RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/anarchy-in-new-york

After Attorney General William Barr designated New York, along with Portland and Seattle, as “anarchistic” cities, Gotham mayor Bill de Blasio expressed outrage. He characterized it as a political attack on “black and brown cities”—though Portland and Seattle are two of the whitest cities in the nation—and denied that New York is remotely lawless or otherwise anarchic. Now the mayors of the three jurisdictions, facing the loss of federal funding, have sued the administration, calling the designation false and illegal.

It’s true that New York City wouldn’t be confused for Tegucigalpa or Mogadishu. And its violent crime rate, while soaring, is still much lower than that of Baltimore or St. Louis, for instance. But comparing New York today with the New York of even a few years ago makes clear that the city is undergoing a serious fracturing of civic order—one trending toward further disintegration.

One late summer Sunday morning, Demetrius Harvard, a 30-year old Bronx man, stood on a subway platform in Greenwich Village and methodically threw construction material onto the tracks. Bystanders tried to stop him, and someone even went into the train well to remove the debris, but Harvard persisted in his sabotage. Eventually, he succeeded in derailing an uptown A train, injuring several passengers.

You had to read to the end of tabloid news reports to get the real story. Two weeks earlier, in the same neighborhood, Harvard had tossed a steel bench through a bus window. He was arrested, charged with criminal mischief, and immediately “ROR’d”—released on his recognizance—with no bail.

This cycle is now all too common in New York, where public order and safety have been buffeted by chaotic forces. Criminal-justice reform at the state level removed bail as an option for all but the most heinous charges. Locally, the NYPD has stopped enforcing many quality-of-life laws. The city council passed a law forbidding cops from applying pressure to the chest or back of an arrestee while trying to handcuff him, on the premise that this tactic is tantamount to asphyxiation; officers dealing with a resisting suspect would thus potentially face assault charges if they attempt to restrain him with vigor.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/democrats-barrett-demagoguery/

The high stakes of this Supreme Court confirmation brought out the worst in Senate Democrats.

A fter their floating of the Court-packing notion proved unpopular, and after their redefining of the meaning of “packing” proved unpersuasive, congressional Democrats and the Biden campaign have settled on a new stratagem to confront the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. They now warn that they will visit future “consequences” on the country but do not specify what those consequences will be.

This is mainly saber-rattling out of frustration over being unable to stop Barrett’s appointment. To repeat what I pointed out two weeks ago, Democrats do not appear to have the votes they would need to eliminate the filibuster, which is what it would take to expand the Court and pack it with progressive activist justices. Yet, with Election Day just a week away and control of both the executive and legislative branches hanging in the balance, Democrats cannot afford to depress the turn-out of hard-Left voters (particularly the young, who are notoriously unreliable in terms of converting their Democratic Party sympathies into actual votes).

In addition, Democrats can see that their demagoguery has a paralyzing effect on Chief Justice John Roberts. Last week, Roberts joined the Court’s three remaining liberals to block the Court’s review of the Democrat-controlled Pennsylvania supreme court’s rewriting of state election law. The state judges ordered that Pennsylvania’s election board must continue counting mail-in and absentee ballots for three days after Election Day. Worse, it must presume that any late-arriving ballots should count unless there is ironclad postmark proof that they were mailed after the deadline — which will necessarily result in the counting of votes that were not submitted until after the election was supposed to be over (i.e., ballots submitted after the national media have reported voting results).