Democrats sharply disagree with each other over whether violent crime in the nation’s capital should be punished less or more. That’s not the same as saying they don’t know what they want. If you assume that each of them is acting from self-interest rather than for the public good, all the fog evaporates to reveal remarkable consistency.
The latest chapter of the saga involves an effort by Phil Mendelson, chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, to withdraw criminal code revisions that would scrap mandatory minimum sentences, cut maximum penalties, allow perpetrators to tie up the court system with jury trials, and punish violent and dangerous crimes such as carjacking with a slap on the wrist.
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In short, Washington’s home rule government wants to make crime easier.
But temporarily, that doesn’t suit either President Joe Biden or congressional Democrats. Their party’s asinine policies and its rogue social-engineering Soros prosecutors have produced a massive crime spike. There are now, for example, more than four times as many carjackings in Washington, D.C., as there were three years ago. All over the country, voters are being assaulted, murdered, and robbed far more frequently than they were before Democrats took charge. And those voters naturally don’t like it.
National Democrats are, therefore, justifiably terrified that they’ll be punished in the 2024 elections as soft on crime because they are soft on crime.
Biden knows he has a problem and he is trying to fix it. He wants to get squared away where he is weak before he announces his bid for reelection. At first, he told congressional Democrats he’d support the district's watered-down penal code. But realizing the danger he was in, he flip-flopped and said he wouldn’t veto a House Republican bill nixing the reforms if it arrived on his desk after approval by the Senate.
Cue panic on the D.C. Council. Congress and Biden sweeping aside the council's decisions cuts home rule off at the knees and makes any talk of Washington, D.C., statehood even more of an absurdity than it already is. So, while Biden’s self-interest urged him to woo voters with a Sister Souljah moment — President Bill Clinton ostentatiously repudiated the musician for advocating violence against whites during the 1992 presidential primary season — D.C. Council members’ self-interest is to avoid being exposed as vassals of Congress. The result is that Mendelson says he’s withdrawing the reforms, so a vote in the Senate would be moot. “If Republicans want to have a vote on Wednesday or Thursday, they are voting on nothing,” he said.
"Yeah — no!" as the saying goes. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress authority over the district, not the other way around. Mendelson has no say about what Congress may vote on. Just because he wants to avoid a vote demonstrating congressional authority over him doesn’t mean he can do so. The Constitution gives him no right to withdraw his bill once it has gone up to Capitol Hill for approval. So, sorry, Mr. Mendelson, you’re going to have to suck it up.
The self-interest of Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and other congressional Democrats is the same as Biden’s. They need to blunt accusations that they side with criminals against law-abiding citizens. They’re entering the 2024 election cycle as the soft-on-crime party, and they can muddy the waters by slapping down the council's egregious proposals. The Democratic majority’s current plan in the Senate is therefore to hold a vote and presumably repudiate the reforms. Mendelson and his council can lump it.
The district’s governing lefties will be humiliated and their self-importance will be punctured, therefore, because their national party colleagues have both the power and the inclination to do so and it serves their immediate interests.
But whatever the current stratagems, the public should remember that what we are watching is mostly theater. Killing the D.C. Council's reforms is a good thing — thank you, Republicans — but Democrats are not doing this out of conviction. They are moving the deckchairs around, getting their staging right for the coming election battle.
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They will, however, still be the party of crime and favors for perpetrators. They still form the Sister Souljah party. They still want to forgive violence on spurious grounds of racial equity, and even approve of it — see the George Floyd riots of 2020 — if it is in pursuit of the right political causes.
They are quickly putting a coat of fresh paint on their cracking and crumbling agenda, but underneath it is still the shabby and disgraceful thing that the past few years have shown it to be.