I can’t always define it, but I know wrongdoing when I see it.
This is the thought when envisioning the imaginary line between free speech and legitimate protest versus unlawful personal threats and violent provocations like we’ve seen lately in harassment of certain Supreme Court justices and their perceived views towards overturning the longstanding but ill-considered federal abortion precedent embodied in Roe v. Wade.
It’s old news by now, but ever since a draft opinion was unethically if not illegally published (most likely by a Court insider) a week and a half ago, leftists have been behaving badly. At the behest of some unnamed organizer, dozens or more “protesters” showed up outside the homes of six conservative jurists (included is Chief Justice John Roberts) and various houses of worship last weekend and, let’s just put it mildly, disturbed the peace. This wasn’t necessarily part of, but was certainly related to, the more “official” demonstrations at the Supreme Court itself and at other government buildings across the country. Some of these less-than-spontaneous gatherings have resulted in mayhem and rioting reminiscent of the awful, contentious summer of 2020, where leftist anarchists and hooligans were permitted to run wild though city streets overturning cop cars, shattering windows, looting stores and in many locations, burning them.
Historic statues were pulled down before our eyes as news crews captured real-time imagery of crowds assaulting public property with little or no police presence in sight. Watching leftist scum who probably couldn’t spell “history” if their lives depended on it ruin the representations of long dead Confederate soldiers in Portsmouth, Virginia, made my blood boil.
Much more than just stone figures fell victim to the delinquency wave, too. Murder statistics are way up in every American city as unsupported (in terms of legal protection) law enforcement personnel have largely pulled back, hesitant to possibly go overboard and end up the next show trial victim like the police officers in Minneapolis or private citizen Kyle Rittenhouse were in their respective locations.
Who hasn’t seen shocking views of mobs of criminals invading stores and stealing everything they could get their hands on before exiting without pursuit? To put it more directly, does anyone feel like patronizing a pharmacy in San Francisco these days?
And most if not all of these obvious lawbreakers escaped prosecution under liberal policies that decriminalized so-called petty thefts and other deviant behaviors, the perpetrators tacitly shielded by prosecutors who didn’t file charges against them. It’s enough to make decent Americans doubt that true law and order can ever be restored.
Thankfully, a group of conservative House Republicans have proposed to do something about the wave of crime sweeping the country. Philip Wegmann reported at Real Clear Politics:
“Republicans are laying a legislative agenda. And the plan in the RSC memo is the most comprehensive picture voters have to date for how Republicans will seek to tackle crime if they retake the majority. First and foremost, the ‘Concerned Citizens Bill of Rights’ is fiduciary in nature. Conservatives would use congressional purse strings to close the net on states and local authorities they believe ‘promote the left’s pro-criminal agenda.’
“Among other things, this means withholding money from states ‘when their district attorneys’ offices systematically decline to prosecute types of cases or charge certain crimes,’ and also cutting off federal dollars ‘to states that have ‘no-cash bail’ laws on the books.’ The RSC would also tie strings to federal funding, perhaps largest among them the condition that state and local police departments open their books and report all crimes to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program.
“The memo also details 10 other proposed reforms, each of them almost certain to trigger a showdown with the White House.”
In his piece, Wegmann provides an overview of the entire reform package, and it is well worth a full read if you have time. The author also points out that the legislation has little or no chance of passing in the current Congress because there’s no way Democrats would even consider a get-tough approach to crime fighting. That’s the truth, especially when liberals have spent the past however many years bashing on the police and blaming violence spikes on “racism” and “white supremacists”.
Street crime is a minor bother to Democrats, who much prefer collecting political points by echoing phony slogans like “Black Lives Matter” and talking openly about how they empathize with the oppressed who struggle under “systemic racism.” Never mind that almost all of these problem spots are governed by Democrats on the state and local level. All the politicians want is more and more federal grants to treat a problem that only exists in the activists’ heads.
The local residents, the majority of them minorities, who have to deal with the shootings, theft, property destruction and intimidation are the ones who truly suffer. At least Republicans are willing to cut off the money spigot to these locales if the rulers won’t get their act together. We can’t always define it, but we know wrongdoing when we see it.
Needless to say, senile president Joe Biden wouldn’t go along with the Republicans either. Democrats, including Biden, have gone to great hyperbolic lengths to depict the January 6 riot as an “insurrection” and the work of treasonous “white supremacists” who sought to bring down the government, but when it came to commenting on the protests around the Supreme Court justices’ houses, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki dumbed it down:
“The president’s view is that there’s a lot of passion, a lot of fear, a lot of sadness from many, many people across this country about what they saw in that leaked document. We obviously want people’s privacy to be respected. We want people to protest peacefully if they want to protest. That is certainly what the president’s view would be.”
Psaki’s apathetic attitude and words, in a nutshell, are the reason why Democrats will take a bath on this issue in November’s midterms and why Republicans are choosing to highlight the liberal party’s soft on crime stance as a mainstay of their pitch to retake control of Congress in order to serve as a counterbalance to Biden’s self-destructive incompetence.
In addition to depriving blue cities and states of federal resources, the Republican plan would include qualified immunity for police officers in the line of duty. Policemen and women would feel some sense of assurance that they wouldn’t be personally sued by the ACLU or other leftist legal group for doing their jobs according to their training. It’s basic common sense, but try telling it to a Democrat.
Far be it from me to offer political advice to Democrats -- after all, they pay consultants a lot of money to provide the same thing -- but the more they side with the very visible miscreants and losers who make up the army of “protesters” griping about abortion, “climate change” or other leftist fantasy causes, the more the backlash will grow.
If Democrats were smart, they would acknowledge that Donald Trump attained such a massive following among “ordinary folks” and is gaining a larger and larger share of minorities’ votes because he unequivocally sided with law enforcement rather than the aggrieved marchers who couldn’t articulate why they were so pissed off in the first place.
People aren’t going to remember what an individual protest was supposed to be about but they sure will recall when a store is looted and burned or a historic statue is pulled down or tagged with unsightly graffiti. Somehow, the anarchists believe they’re winning converts by burning American flags or shouting “Get a vasectomy” on the Supreme Court grounds, but they’re actually turning people off.
Since Democrats are grasping for something -- anything -- to base this year’s campaign on, they’re often caught accusing Republicans of simply being contrarians and the “party of no” that opposes everything that Nancy Pelosi, Chucky Schumer and Joe Biden suggest simply because they hope to regain power in the next Congress.
And it’s correct that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell did ignore the question when asked to supply an agenda that Republicans would work to implement if they come into power, but other party members aren’t taking the issue so lightly. Florida senator Rick Scott introduced his set of ideas (11-point plan to Rescue America, which includes point three on Safety and Crime) a couple months ago and now groups like the Republican Study Committee in the House are following with their own offerings in advance.
Democrats are the ones with empty proposals for more “diversity sensitivity training” and lectures about inherent race bias and how there’s a racist hidden in every person with a pale complexion. Let them defend the rioters and then try to explain why crime statistics have gone up so rapidly since they took power.
No doubt they’ll blame everything on Donald Trump. It’s the only thing they’ve got.
The American people aren’t stupid. They see protests of private homes, leftist agitators getting in the faces of decent folks at restaurants and a liberal establishment political class that’s so out of touch with reality that they can’t even condemn wrongdoing when they see it. November’s results will be the best teacher, and the lesson couldn’t come fast enough.
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