Random violence grows into a scourge on American society.
Recently in our nation’s capital, a staffer for U.S. Sen. Rand Paul was brutally attacked by a stranger, a dangerous assailant named Glynn Neal. The unprovoked stabbing was so ferocious that the victim’s family revealed that only “the intervention of our son’s friend helped prevent the wounds from being fatal.”
The attacker had been released from federal prison just the day before the vicious attempted murder. In fact, the violent assailant was released early due to the jailbreak D.C. establishment bill that Donald Trump signed into law, known as the “First Step Act.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis now promises, as a presidential candidate, to repeal the First Step Act – and for good reasons. This pledge represents the latest clarifying differentiator between DeSantis the effective conservative and Trump the rudderless politician drifting leftward.
The Trump sentencing reduction statute was ushered through the Congress by the Beltway uniparty establishment, including Paul Ryan as Speaker, Republican Sen. Tim Scott, and key Senate Democratic liberals like Dick Durbin. On the White House side, Trump acquiesced to the lobbying of Hollywood celebrities like Kim Kardashian as well as his liberal New York son-in-law.
After signing this misbegotten law, Team Trump devoted considerable resources marketing the get-out-of-jail-early legislation as some nod to black Americans, a dubious and insulting notion on its own. But despite constant bragging about this jailbreak and the so-called “Platinum Plan,” Trump’s performance among black citizens barely improved in 2020 vs. 2016, with a whopping 90 percent of black voters opting for Biden, per AP’s VoteCast.
As usual, so-called “compromise” with the Democrats in Washington actually means that Republicans simply cave to leftist demands … and then receive no electoral benefit for the surrender. Americans increasingly grasp what time it is in America, politically and culturally. In this present moment, Democrats and their corporate media allies lie about foundational, previously universally accepted truths such as the necessity of a border and the existence of two sexes.
So, in this era, bipartisanship becomes a euphemism for populist capitulation to the ruling class. In the case of this dreadful bipartisan legislation, Trump enthusiastically joined with CNN’s Van Jones and Sen. Chuck Schumer to pass a jailbreak statute. This new leniency creates totally preventable carnage, because dangerous malcontents like Neal should still be serving their sentences.
In fact, of the thousands of convicted criminals released early by Trump, Ryan, and the Democrats, a minority percentage of the total are non-violent drug offenders. Instead, as Tucker Carlson reported in 2019, of the 2,243 convicts first released early under the Trump prison reduction law, a staggering 735 of the criminals had been incarcerated for weapons charges or sex crimes.
Sen. John Kennedy remarked about the uniparty false advertising barrage that led to the passage of the First Step Act: “We were told that this would only allow low-level, nonviolent criminals to go free. I didn’t believe it, and I didn’t believe it because I read the bill.” Kennedy, not surprisingly, called the lead-up to the bill “a big lie.”
No wonder soft-on-crime liberals rallied to the bill from the earliest days. For example, after Trump signed the FSA, the far left-leaning Philadelphia Inquirer beamed that “liberals should celebrate” in an opinion piece. Instead of owning up to this critical mistake and promising to repeal or reform it, now the Trump campaign instead twists the truth to pretend that DeSantis also believed in the First Step Act as a congressman.
But the real record proves that the governor voted for a prior, far more stringent law-and-order version of the bill, one that was opposed by liberals like the ACLU and Cory Booker. But those groups and politicians fully embraced the far more liberal bill that eventually passed, without the support of DeSantis.
This obfuscation on Trump’s jailbreak points to an even more serious problem for the 45th president as he seeks reelection: He remains unable or unwilling to admit policy mistakes and to propose appropriate reversals or reforms. From empowering Anthony Fauci to the First Step Act, Trump refuses to acknowledge errors and propose sensible fixes.
For example, in the first days of the crisis, DeSantis implemented the Fauci-Trump measures to “slow the spread” of COVID, but soon realized through careful study and better data that the White House was wrong. DeSantis admitted the error of former policies and then aggressively reopened Florida, making it a beacon of sanity, freedom, and rational policy for all of America.
With crime out of control across American cities, our citizens desperately need tough-on-crime leadership. Moreover, with the left pushing increasingly illogical tyrannies, the republic needs a president who operates on reason – and possesses the self-awareness to course correct when necessary.
Steve Cortes is a former adviser to President Trump and national spokesman for the pro-DeSantis Never Back Down PAC. This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
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