XPost: dc.politics, talk.politics.guns, sac.politics
XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh

In article <suejoc$mi7$1@dont-email.me>
<governor.swill@gmail.com> wrote:

Now, put the niggers who authored it out of fucking work. Fire them.

In Washington DC, the law prohibits the playing of bandy and
“shindy” in the streets, the arson of one’s own steamboat and
potentially even being a “common scold” – a common law offense
levied against those who quarreled with their neighbors.

Aware of the need to clean up this 120-year-old criminal code,
lawyers in America’s capital city have spent more than a decade
and a half going through the law books in a modernization
campaign described by those involved as long overdue, only to
see the effort stymied this week at the hands of Joe Biden and
an unlikely alliance of Republicans and Democrats.

“Many residents are worried about taking their kids to school or
going to the grocery store. But rather than attempt to fix this
problem, the DC city council wants to go even easier on
criminals,” Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy said in
February, when the chamber’s lawmakers approved a resolution
blocking the city council’s passage of the new code.

Weeks later, Biden surprised his allies by announcing he would
sign the House bill, and last Wednesday, the Senate passed it
overwhelmingly – even though the president and many Democratic
lawmakers support making Washington DC, the country’s only
federal district, a full-fledged state.

That Republicans would meddle in Washington DC’s politics is no
surprise: they have few friends among the leadership of the
overwhelmingly Democratic city. But for Democrats, their
willingness to go along with the GOP effort is a sign of just
how nervous the party has become to accusations of being weak of
crime, which played a role in their loss of the House in last
November’s elections. Residents’ frustrations with violence are
also seen as a reason why Democrat Lori Lightfoot failed in her
bid for a second term as mayor of Chicago.

No city in America has political dynamics quite like
Washington’s, where Congress has the power to overturn the city
council’s will – which it did, for the first time in 30 years,
over what local officials say was merely an update that would
bring its criminal code in line with national standards.

“We are an easy mark,” said Charles Allen, a city councilman who
chaired its judiciary committee as the body was considering the
revisions. “We don’t have representation in Congress, we have no
senators out there that are arguing for us. We don’t have any
full members of Congress in the House.”

Sandwiched between Virginia and Maryland, Washington DC’s
population of nearly 700,000 is greater than Vermont or Wyoming,
but unlike those two states, the capital city’s only
representation in Congress is a House delegate who can’t cast
votes. The city government officially backs Washington DC
becoming America’s 51st state, which Republicans universally
oppose.

In 2006, the council started reviewing the city’s criminal laws,
which date back to 1901, and sought out the thoughts of the
public defenders office, local prosecutors and criminal justice
reform advocates across the city. The outcome of the 16-year
process was a new code that removed mandatory minimum sentences
for nearly all crimes, aligned sentences with what judges were
actually handing down, added new offenses and raised the
potential penalties for others, while also stripping out common
law penalties that lingered in the turn-of-the-century document.

But after the council unanimously passed the revised code last
November, the city’s Democratic mayor Muriel Bowser announced
she would veto it, citing its reduction in maximum sentences for
gun offenses, among other issues. Republicans pounced after the
council overrode her veto in January, and the following month,
Biden unexpectedly signed on to the GOP effort.

“I support DC statehood and home-rule – but I don’t support some
of the changes DC council put forward over the mayor’s
objections – such as lowering penalties for carjackings,” the
Democratic president tweeted.

Although police department data indicates overall crime in the
city fell by about 4% last year, carjackings have jumped
dramatically since the pandemic. Under the current code, armed
carjackers could face jail sentences of between 15 and 40 years,
but the new code sets the highest penalty at 24 years, in line
with what judges were actually giving defendants and comparable
to similar penalties nationwide, said Jinwoo Park, executive
director of the DC Criminal Code Reform Commission.

“I do think this has been completely inaccurately and unfairly
painted as some kind of bizarrely radical bill, when really it’s
just not the case when you compare it to the norms across the
country,” Park said.

Studies have repeatedly shown that long prison sentences don’t
act as deterrents for criminals. And for Washington’s current
batch of carjackers, the code’s revisions would not have made
much difference: it was only supposed to come into effect in
2025.

“Every crime people are talking about, from yesterday to today
to tomorrow, happens under our current criminal code,” said
Allen.

There’s little evidence that message was received by Congress,
particularly not by Republicans, who cast the code revision as
consequence of left-wing government run amok – even though they
held no hearings on the code before voting to overturn it.

“It seems to me that DC is trying to compete with other liberal-
led cities to see just how woke they can be. So, just imagine if
Congress didn’t have this authority and the DC council was left
to its own devices, and this dangerous bill would’ve become
law,” said Bill Hagerty, Tennessee’s Republican senator, after
almost all the chamber’s Republicans and most Democrats voted
for the disapproval resolution.

Yet the new code doesn’t address progressive concerns such as
mass incarceration or racial equity, which Park said weren’t
included in the commission’s mandate.

“There’s an enormous amount of compromise built into the bill,”
said Patrice Sulton, executive director of the DC Justice Lab,
which advocates for reforms of the city’s system of crime and
punishment.

Local leaders scrambled to react to Congress’s renewed meddling
in the city’s affairs, with city council president Phil
Mendelson withdrawing the revised code from the legislature’s
consideration, and Bowser proposing another round of revisions
to the code.

“What’s important for this issue is to try to put Democrats in
the light of being soft on crime,” Mendelson said as he
announced his ill-fated attempt to stop the Senate from blocking
the code. “But citizens don’t understand that because [of] the
way this has been demagogued, and that’s the challenge we have
to overcome.”

The GOP has signaled it’s not done yet: House Republicans now
want to override a city council bill that would change, among
other procedures, how the police department uses force.

While he believes there’s still momentum for reform in many
cities nationwide, Nick Turner, president of the Vera Institute
of Justice, warned that the episode in the capital underscores
how rising crime presents a headwind to the calls for change in
policing and punishment that George Floyd’s death sparked nearly
three years ago.

Biden’s veto tell “opponents of good, evidence-based criminal
justice policy that scare tactics work. And the risk is that
what it signals to other responsible government leaders is that
it will show efforts to make sure that we have both safety and
justice,” Turner warned.

To Sulton, the revised code’s downfall also represents a setback
in the city’s desire to take full control of its affairs.

“Until we have a new code, we continue to live under laws that
are vague, overlapping gaps in law, and just a penal code that
the district didn’t make itself,” she said. “And I don’t think
you can talk about local control if we don’t have control over
our most fundamental freedoms. And I can’t think of anywhere
that the stakes are higher than when we’re talking about whether
to put a person in a cage.”

We're not putting "persons" in a cage. We're putting the
disobedient zoo animals in cages where they belong.

<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/12/a-bill-was- supposed-to-fix-washington-dcs-problems-instead-it-polarized-a-
city>

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