Voters, including African Americans and Hispanics, are losing patience with the hard-left approach to law enforcement, but House Democrats don’t seem to care.
Voters, including African Americans and Hispanics, are losing patience with the hard-left approach to law enforcement, but House Democrats don’t seem to care.
A recent Pew Research Center survey of Democratic voters found that only 12 percent self-identify as “progressives” and hold extremely liberal views on race, immigration, and redistributing income. They are unrepresentative of the party as a whole — nearly 70 percent of these progressives are white and 60 percent embrace socialism — but they dominate Democratic policy outcomes.
Just last week, the “Squad” of progressive House members that’s clustered around Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delayed for a second time a public-safety bill that would fund grants so local police departments could hire more officers.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights says any new federal money for police is merely part of “a discriminatory criminalization-first approach to public safety.” The Congressional Black Caucus opposes more police money, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi bowed to them by yanking the bill off the House floor. Pelosi isn’t exactly a profile in courage on the issue, telling reporters that, on police funding, “it’s up to the Black Caucus.”
Representative Pramila Jayapal, the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, says that requests for funding the police are “very divisive” among Democratic House members, and she is pessimistic they will ever pass this Congress.
The irony is that Democrats just got a wake-up call on just how much the appearance of being anti-police can hurt even candidates running in liberal areas. Representative Ilhan Omar, a leading “defund the police” advocate, barely survived her Democratic primary in Minneapolis this past week.
Her opponent was Don Samuels, an immigrant from Jamaica who had served on the Minneapolis City Council. Samuels attacked Omar’s decision to back a referendum last November that would have replaced the local police department with a social-services agency. The referendum was voted down by a wide margin, 56 percent to 44 percent, with the biggest opposition coming from African-American neighborhoods, which were 78 percent against the idea.
Samuels received endorsements from the state’s largest newspaper, the Star Tribune, and from Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, who said Omar was impossible to work with.
“She was out of touch with the community she was claiming to protect,” Samuels said. He hopes his effort will nudge Omar to either tone down her radicalism or encourage another challenge against her in 2024.
Ilhan Omar’s narrow escape is evidence that voters have lost patience with anti-police extremists and are all too willing to express their dissatisfaction at the polls.
Progressives nonetheless are convinced that voters aren’t focused on the crime issue. Moderate House Democrats are anxious to show their law-enforcement bona fides before the November elections and view the police bill as essential to their political survival.
But Representative Joyce Beatty, head of the Congressional Black Caucus, told reporters last month: “My folks are very clear on voting how they need to vote for their constituency, and for their districts and their beliefs.” In other words, before her members even think about approving a police-funding bill in the House, they will insist on language that purports to crack down on police abuses.
Progressives such as Beatty are now further emboldened by the passage of the Schumer-Manchin spending bill in Congress. It’s chock-full of higher corporate taxes and funding for alternative energy and for the hiring of 87,000 more IRS employees. Ro Khanna, a leading progressive House member from California, told the Economist in July that the only reason the full progressive vision hasn’t yet been enacted is “that there are some anti-democratic structures within our political system: the filibuster, gerrymandering, and massive amounts of money allowed into the political process.”
Despite all the evidence piling up — from Ilhan Omar’s near-defeat in woke Minneapolis to the flow of Hispanics to the GOP over cultural and crime issues — it appears that progressive Democrats will continue to ignore signs that the public is rejecting many of their ideas. The last place they will look for someone to blame will be in a mirror.