I made a post earlier about today’s House Judiciary Committee field trip to the Big Apple, where Chairman Jim Jordan brought his crusade against the national scandal of progressive prosecutors — or, as Democrats see it, his interference with one of them, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is prosecuting Donald Trump. The proceedings were rambunctious — and, I’d say, worrying for Democrats who support Bragg and the other lefty prosecutors-against-prosecution.
Crime is a powerful issue. Jordan and other pro-Trump Republicans are undoubtedly motivated to impress the Trump base by berating his prosecutor. On the other hand, though, Bragg deserves scathing criticism for his soft-on-crime policies and his unabashed politicization of his office: an incoherent and likely invalid indictment against Trump for a trivial misdemeanor — which may not even be a misdemeanor, but which he is trying to turn into 34 felonies — that Bragg would not have brought against anyone except a political rival whom he vowed, Soviet style, to use his power against if elected.
Even people who have no use for Trump must wonder how a prosecutor has time and resources for such a case in light of the real crime problems plaguing this country. To understand why, just flip through today’s news — e.g., a lethal riot capping a not-atypical Chicago weekend that saw eight killed by gunfire, 32 others wounded, and the new lefty defund-the-police mayor hand-wringing about how “it is not constructive to demonize youth”; a youth mob in California first blocking off Compton streets in the wee hours of Sunday morning then ransacking a gas-station convenience store of thousands of dollars in merchandise (no arrests have yet been made, though the siege is on video).
Committee Democrats cannot feel too jaunty after mouthing their stock lines about Trump only to be shouted down by New Yorkers, who warned them not to talk down to crime victims. New York Democrat Dan Goldman, in particular, took it on the chin from Madeline Brame, the mother of a murder victim, who told him, “Don’t insult my intelligence.” Meanderings like his, she indicated, were “why I walked away from the plantation of the Democratic Party.”
Goldman replied that he . . . looked forward to working with Ms. Brame.
Perhaps the hearing’s most tense moment came when an anti-Bragg New Yorker had to be removed from the hearing for shouting that Bragg and Democrats were refusing to protect the people of the city. Before being escorted out (and proclaiming, “I love you, Jim Jordan”) the protester unloaded on committee Democrats, including one in particular: “It’s disgraceful what you guys do. You are utterly disgraceful. Ralph Nader, you’re a disgrace to this country.”
Nader, the self-styled consumer advocate and oft-time third-party presidential candidate, was not in attendance, however. The unhinged man apparently intended his dress-down for the committee’s ranking member and longtime Manhattan congressman Jerry Nadler.