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.
