​When You’ve Lost Chuck Schumer, You’ve Really Lost

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) walks to speak to members of the media at the US Capitol in Washington on March 2, 2023. (Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

​Late in the afternoon of March 8 the Senate voted to block an overhaul of Washington, D.C.’s criminal code that would have shaved years off prison sentences for a range of violent crimes including rape, armed robbery, burglary, and carjacking. The Senate vote was overwhelming: 81–14. Only a few Democratic Party diehards seemed willing to cling to the recently widespread progressive mantra that the key to reducing crime is to reduce criminal enforcement.

​Just a few weeks ago it did seem likely that the Senate wouldn’t endorse the new code unanimously approved by the D.C. Council last year, but only because a predictable handful of Democratic centrists representing red states—West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, Montana’s Jon Tester, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown—announced they would vote along with Senate Republicans for disapproval. Since Democratic control of the Senate is by a paper-thin single-vote majority, Democrats were counting on a veto by President Joe Biden, a longtime supporter of home rule for the District of Columbia, that would effectively allow the new code to become law.

​But then two things happened. On March 2, Biden announced by tweet: “If the Senate votes to overturn what D.C. Council did—I’ll sign it.” And on March 7, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer declared that he, too, would support the resolution rejecting the code overhaul, effectively siding with the Republicans. “It was a close question, but on balance I’m voting yes,” he said.

Schumer has made a point of consistently siding with his party’s progressive wing on such issues as climate change and Biden’s student-loan cancellations. But his sudden opposition to the D.C. criminal code wasn’t just a dramatic ideological turnaround. It also sent a signal to his fellow Senate Democrats that they, too, could scramble away from looking soft on crime. And scramble they did. In the Republican-dominated House of Representatives, which had voted 250–173 on Feb. 9 to block the District’s code overhaul, only 31 Democrats had broken rank with their fellows to side with the GOP. A month later, in the Senate, so many Democrats jumped to the Republican flank that you could say that there was no rank to break.

The criminal-code fiasco was a humiliating defeat for the ultra-liberal D.C. Council. It had already been embarrassed by a veto of the new code by the district’s otherwise progressive Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser. Bowser had argued that the code’s proposed reductions in sentences for violent crimes would “send the wrong message” to potential criminals. But the council had unanimously overridden her veto. Then, on March 6, when it became clear that the new code was doomed in Congress, the council hastily voted to withdraw it, but it was too late to save face.

It seems that the Democrats, from Biden on down, have finally learned the lesson that a lax stance toward criminal behavior is a grave political liability. Over the past decade, and certainly after the May 2020 death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody, the prevailing progressive ethos in liberal-dominated cities and states has been “decarceration”—lessening sentences for or declining to prosecute crimes in the hope of reducing prison terms—and “defunding the police”—reducing law-enforcement resources so as to reduce arrests.

In June 2020 the D.C. Council cut $15 million from the police budget, redirecting much of the funds to something called “violence interruption” involving civilian counselors. Some of the funding got restored, but the net result has been a manpower depletion in the D.C. police force plus skyrocketing crime. As for carjackings, frightening crimes that involve drivers being forcibly ejected from their vehicles, during the first two months of 2023 alone, the District’s Metropolitan Police Department reported 82 such offenses as of Feb. 22, well more than one a day. The D.C. Council’s revised criminal code would have nearly halved the maximum sentence for armed carjacking, from 40 years to 24 years, and eliminated altogether the current mandatory minimum seven-year sentence for this terrifying act of lawlessness.

What must have struck mortal fear in Democratic senators’ hearts, though, was the abject failure of Chicago Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot to make it even to the runoffs in her reelection race on Feb. 28. Lightfoot, who took office in 2019, seemed to be the quintessential defund-the-police progressive, proposing to cut some $80 million from the Chicago department’s budget in 2020. Crime soared in Chicago, with homicides in 2021 reaching their highest level in 25 years. Although the Chicago murder numbers have declined slightly since then, robberies, burglaries, and other thefts have been on the upswing (motor vehicle thefts in Chicago more than doubled from 2021 to 2022 (pdf)). Lightfoot’s polling approval ratings plunged from the 70 percent range in 2019 to 27 percent (pdf) just before the Feb. 28 election.

Democratic politicians may be many things, but they’re generally not stupid. Defunding the police and emptying the prisons might have sounded good in 2020, but voters have had a full two years to see how those idealistic-sounding progressive policies have worked out in real life. In crime-ridden Democratic-led cities from Portland to Los Angeles to Chicago to New York to Washington, D.C., the answer has been: not very well. So when Schumer gave Senate Democrats a chance to distance themselves as far as they could from looking soft on crime to their constituents, they took it in spades.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.