Change can be voted for in Chicago

The Case for Crime in the General Republikanism: Reply to Cosmology of Political Processes”

Kennedy is far from competitive in the re- election. Gary Chambers is a community activist in Baton Rouge who is polling in the teens. And, in this instance, the Democrat in question really has endorsed the idea of cutting police budgets.

That wasn’t the unusual part. Republicans painted Democrats as hostile to the police and as cheerleaders for rioting and mayhem in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. And even though the data on crime is mixed, the tactic seems to be working for the G.O.P. in many races.

Paul Begala is a political consultant for Bill Clinton in 1992 and was also a counselor in the White House. His opinions are contained in this commentary. View more opinion on CNN.

The Republican candidates in New York State focused on crime last year, which was better than usual. The candidates would try to change the subject. Black and brown communities were being insulted by those who said, “Don’t talk about crime.” Nancy Pelosi stated that the Democrats could have maintained control of the House if they had taken crime more seriously in New York.

Democrats “want crime,” Tuberville crowed to the MAGA folks at A Trump rally in Nevada “because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have.” The Democrats think the people that do the crime are owed some compensation for their enslavement of black Americans, according to him.

The Role of Catalysmic Crime in the Elections: Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Rep. Val Demings

My friend Bakari Sellers spoke for millions when he said that Tommy Tuberville could go to hell. Tuberville made millions from the work of Black athletes in college football. It is not right to hear that a former college coach got rich because African American football players risked their life and limb on the field.

Democrats are told to tell politicians how to deal with crime but they don’t know how to deal with it. First, let me suggest how not to talk about it.

A great example is Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nevada). Cortez Masto – arguably the most endangered Democrat in the Senate – who is locked in a neck-and-neck race with Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt. Cortez Masto was attorney general before Laxalt, and has worked as a federal prosecutor. She is running ads tout her support for law enforcement because she’s married to a former officer. She has even earned the support of the Republican police chief of Reno.

Cortez Masto was so effective as a crime-fighter that when Laxalt took over as AG, he called her “a role model,” and when he was running for attorney general he said she had done “an excellent job.” Will her tough-on-crime credentials be enough to get her back in the Senate? I don’t know. But if she weren’t leaning in on crime, this race might already be over.

Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) is another Democrat who is unafraid of the crime issue. When you go to her campaign website, just below the standard “Donate Here” plea, there is a photo of Demings in a police uniform.

Demings spent 27 years in that uniform, rising to become Orlando, Florida’s first female police chief. In one campaign ad, she walks across the screen as the images behind her show her in her uniform.

The candidate mentions that she will protect Florida from bad ideas like de funding the police. That is just crazy. She says that it’s time to send a cop to the Senate.

Demings trailed incumbent Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) by five points in a recent poll, but Rubio is either taking no chances or panicking. In a controversial ad, he accused Demings of supporting a “radical left agenda”, including “turning boys into girls.” (Fact check: WESH-TV in Orlando labeled Rubio’s claim “False.”)

The election races for Cortez Masto and Demings are close. But by standing strong against crime, both women are showing Democrats how to handle the issue.

Of course, many Democrats can’t point to decades as a cop or years as a prosecutor. But they can – they should, heck, they must – read and promote a new study by the center-left think tank Third Way. According to Third Way’s research, Democrats are actually doing a much better job in fighting crime than Republicans, at least in terms of looking at one key metric: homicide rates.

It turns out that in 2020, the murder rates in the states Trump carried were 40% higher per capita than in the states Biden won. In every presidential election this century, a group of states with the highest murder rates voted for Republican nominees. Alabama is number four in the state murder rate, compared to Mississippi, Louisiana, and Kentucky.

I Can’t Get Into The Law, But I Can I Can’t Get Them Out Of Here,” Senator John Fetterman, a Republican from Tennessee

“I don’t support it. Manchin said he wanted to put people away, but he didn’t want to let them out, since the DC law lowers sentencing requirements for some violent criminals. I know something about that and would vote to get rid of it.

Manchin’s decision signals the legislation has a good chance of passing in the narrowly divided Senate, where Democrats hold a 51-49 majority. It was supported by 31 Democrats in the Republican-controlled House.

The bill that would repeal the local law was sponsored by a Tennessee Republican senator who called the approach a “common sense” one. Politically, he compared it to the “defund the police” issue and said for centrist Democrats, “I don’t think that’s going to be very popular in their states and this falls right in that lane.”

Biden understands that if Democrats want to move America’s policies in a moderately more progressive direction, they cannot do it at the expense of public safety. Because that’s the fastest path toward political backlash.

Many Democrats don’t want to overturn the DC law. Local officials should instead make their own laws free of congressional interference and decry Republicans for being hypocrites since they typically promote state and local rights. The law was passed after the city council voted to overrule the mayor. She doesn’t want congress to overturn the new law.

The absence of Senator John Fetterman, who is a Democrat from Pennsylvania, complicates efforts to prevent the GOP from passing their bill.

From crime to policing: The story of Karen Bass in Los Angeles, where Amy Adams fought Michael Bloomberg and Rob Corrigendum

Progressives have struggled to develop a persuasive response. The statistics say the crime increase isn’t mainly a right-wing talking point. And voters evidently agree with the statistics:

Adams won the mayor’s race in New York City by focusing on crime. He lost only one of the city’s five boroughs in the Democratic primary.

Portland has become a symbol of post-pandemic disorder and Republicans did well in Oregon last year. Murders doubled, car thefts increased 69 percent and vandalises almost doubled.

The most successful progressive message on crime was developed by Karen Bass, the recently elected mayor of Los Angeles. Bass, who worked in community organizing for 12 years in congress, defeated the conservative candidate not by downplaying crime concerns but by talking about them frequently. Bass was a victim of a crime last year.

She has tried to strike a balance by calling for both the hiring of hundreds of additional police officers and tougher punishments for abusive officers. “We must stop crimes in progress and hold people accountable,” she said in her inaugural address. We can prevent crime and community violence if we address the social, health and economic conditions that compromise a safe environment.

The Chicago runoff will become the next test of whether a progressive message on crime can win in an overwhelmingly Democratic city. In Los Angeles, the progressive and conservative candidates are both black, though Vallas is white.

In the past, Johnson supported calls to defund the police but he has tried to avoid the subject during the mayoral campaign. He wants to increase funding for social services, build more housing, and expand pre-K. He is likely to portray Vallas as a conservative who is out of touch with Chicago. Vallas has been endorsed by the local police union, which has an official who supports Donald Trump.

“No matter where you live, no matter what you look like, you deserve to have a better, stronger, safer Chicago,” Johnson said at his election night party last night.

Biden’s “Reality Check” with the Senate: Avlan’s Critique of a Hard-On-Crime Democrat

John Avlan is an anchor and political analyst for CNN. He is the author of “Lincoln and the Fight for Peace.” His views are not reflected in this commentary. CNN has more opinion.

Being a tough-on-crime Democrat is in keeping with Biden’s beliefs dating back decades. He was criticized a lot for his leadership on the 1994 crime bill in the 2020 campaign, but the law brought down sky-high crime rates for decades. (Yes, it was controversial, but I broke down all the data in this “Reality Check.”)

After it became clear the legislation would be nixed, City Council Chairman Phil Mendelson tried to withdraw the criminal code revision in a letter Monday to the Senate. The bill isn’t before Congress any longer, but we are not sure that this step will stop the Senate Republicans. A Republican aide told CNN the GOP still thinks a Senate vote will stop the legislation.

Biden had earlier surprised some Democrats by tweeting, “I support D.C. Statehood and home-rule — but I don’t support some of the changes D.C. Council put forward over the Mayor’s objections — such as lowering penalties for carjackings. I will sign it if the Senate votes to overturn the D.C. Council.

This response set off members of the progressive caucus, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who fired off criticism of the president’s position, saying that it violated the premise of home rule. That process complaint misses the larger point.

Biden is right on the politics and the policy here, but Democrats do have a reason to be frustrated on purely procedural grounds. The Biden White House made a mistake when they said initially that they were in favor of the bill but against it. That caused a lot of confusion.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/06/opinions/dc-crime-bill-biden-democrats-avlon/index.html

Why Do We Live in DC? What Happens in DC doesn’t Stay in DC: Soft-On-Crime Policies are the Fastest Way to Keep America Beautiful

But what happens in DC doesn’t stay in DC. It becomes a symbol of urban success or decay that members of Congress take back home to their constituents. Advocates of DC home rule and statehood should know that soft-on-crime policies enacted by the City Council of our nation’s capital are the quickest way to ensure that those goals are never achieved.