President Joe Biden’s stand against the wishes of Washington, D.C.’s liberal leaders, and the congressional Democrats who backed them despite concerns about rising crime, marked a rare instance of Biden choosing his political future as a centrist over the excesses of his party.
The drama over criminal justice reforms put forward by the D.C. Council continued to boil over on Monday when the council’s president withdrew a crime bill the U.S. Senate was preparing to strike down in a bipartisan vote later this week.
SENATE PLOWS FORWARD WITH VOTE ON CRIME BILL DESPITE DC COUNCIL BACKPEDAL
The move does not appear enough to stop the vote from moving forward, however; Senate leadership aides said lawmakers will still take up a resolution disapproving of the reforms.
Biden’s pledge to sign that resolution effectively forced the D.C. Council members to abandon their controversial revisions to the city’s criminal code.
It also suggested the president understands the peril that a soft-on-crime label could place him in heading into the 2024 election cycle.
“The president struck the right chord here in terms of continuing to support home rule, supporting public safety measures for city residents while also giving important cover to the dozens of Democrats in both the House and Senate who will support this resolution,” Kevin Walling, a Democratic strategist, told the Washington Examiner.
"As both a resident of D.C. and a supporter of this president, I think he did the right thing when it comes to announcing his intent not to veto the congressional resolution disapproving of the city council’s criminal code changes,” Walling said.
Much of the Democratic consternation over the effort to override the district came from the violation of home rule, or the city’s ability to govern itself. While the Constitution gives Congress the final say over all district laws, the Home Rule Act of 1973 gave the district the ability to elect a mayor and a city council that can pass laws that then head to Congress for review.
Nearly all district laws since the Home Rule Act’s enactment have gone into effect without congressional intervention.
Democrats have long advocated that the district, which is deeply liberal, have more autonomy; many have pushed for the district to gain statehood because doing so would virtually guarantee the addition of two liberal senators and a liberal House lawmaker.
District statehood has animated progressives for years.
But Biden prioritized crime, the far more salient issue in electoral politics, over activists’ demands about district home rule in his opposition to the liberal criminal justice reforms.
In doing so, he deflected a powerful line of attack that Republicans would have hammered heading into 2024.
“We’ve seen this movie before. We all remember the disastrous ‘defund the police’ movement where the idea was to ‘reimagine public safety,’” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said of the D.C. Council’s reforms at a press conference. “The only problem was, the people reimagining public safety forgot about the fact that law enforcement is there not only to protect us but to deter people from committing offenses in the first place.”
Biden could have easily allowed himself to face charges of aligning with “defund the police,” an anti-law enforcement movement popularized in 2020, if he had caved to progressives’ insistence that he hold the line on the district's home rule.
Instead, Biden took the opportunity to distance the White House from unpopular ideas that likely cost some Democrats seats last year in a midterm election that otherwise favored their party.
Still, some Democrats took issue with the way Biden went about making his political calculations.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said the White House sent “mixed signals” about the crime bill, which led 173 House Democrats to vote in favor of the liberal reforms under the impression that Biden would back them.
“[The White House] gave a signal that led the House Democrats to take a certain action, and the president then took a different position when he came to the Senate,” Durbin told CNN on Monday.
On a personal level, Biden’s approach could be beneficial should he run for reelection. By positioning himself as tougher on crime than many of his fellow Democrats, who will undoubtedly suffer GOP attacks based on their vote for the reforms, Biden could pitch himself in a 2024 contest as the most reasonable candidate on an issue that will likely loom large over the race.
His approach could also help his party as a whole. Democrats could feel more empowered to strike a tougher note on crime moving forward given the political cover Biden is providing — a potentially significant development given the intensity of activism on the Left over criminal justice and police reform.
The D.C. Council’s revisions would have eliminated mandatory minimum sentences, among other things, and lowered the penalties for a range of violent crimes, including carjacking.
Because the long-sought changes came amid a spike in carjackings and violence, the reforms became controversial, with even the city’s Democratic mayor attempting to block them before the city council voted to overrule her.
Republicans have accused Biden throughout his presidency of demonstrating too much fealty to the progressive wing of his party.
They have said Biden embraces climate change measures that go beyond what he personally believes are necessary, for example, because activists to his Left demand them. They have said Biden pushed inflammatory rhetoric about voting rights — labeling a set of modest election reforms in Georgia, for example, a resurgence of Jim Crow-style racism — because liberals sensed energy around the issue.
But Biden's break with his party over the Washington, D.C., crime law could weaken that argument against Biden on one of the issues Republicans aim to trumpet the loudest in the next election.
Centrist Senate Democrats will likely have a shot at giving themselves the same advantage.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
A Senate leadership aide said Monday that the D.C. Council's withdrawal of the crime law from Congress will not stop lawmakers from joining the House in voting on the law.
“Not only does the statute not allow for a withdrawal of a transmission, but at this point, the Senate Republican privileged motion will be acting on the House disapproval resolution rather than the D.C. Council’s transmission to the Senate," the aide said. "We still expect the vote to occur.”