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| Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images |
President Donald Trump is entirely right to push back against progressive cashless-bail “reforms,” even if the feds can’t directly counter the state lawmakers who’ve imposed them.
On Monday, Trump signed an executive order instructing the attorney general to identify “states and local jurisdictions” that have “substantially eliminated cash bail,” with an eye to cutting some federal funds for those areas.
The White House is on solid ground in citing how no-bail laws empower “repeat criminals who mock our justice system by committing crime after crime without consequence,” and it’s beyond fair for Trump to fume over how such jurisdictions “waste” funds and create “a threat to public safety” by cutting loose perps with “pending criminal charges or criminal history.”
That said, the law now only allows for limited leveraging of some federal funds, and we fear legislators in states like New York will be all too willing to hike taxes to make up for the loss — and also to shrug at whatever holes in knocks in local government’s budgets.
Albany certainly has no problem dropping its own billion-dollar burdens on City Hall.
Yet the president’s push is still, on balance, good policy and better politics.
Above all, it nationalizes a debate that progressives would rather restrict to areas where they dominate, and so helps force them to defend these policies.
Policies that tell criminals they’ll face no serious immediate consequences for their crimes, and so mushroom rates of recidivism; policies that leave cops having to re-arrest perps who’ve been freed while awaiting trial for other crimes — sometimes just days, or even mere hours, after their first arrests. --->READ MORE HERE
President Trump signed executive orders Monday threatening to upend the fledgling “cashless bail” policies that major cities including Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago have embraced in recent years.
“Cashless bail — we’re ending it, but we’re starting by ending it in D.C.,” Trump told reporters during a signing event in the Oval Office. “We have the right to do [that] through federalization.”
One executive order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to review state and local jurisdictions’ bail policies and submit her findings to the White House in 30 days for review. It further allows members of the administration to review and potentially revoke federal funds given to those jurisdictions that maintain cashless release for some offenders.
“Our great law enforcement officers risk their lives to arrest potentially violent criminals, only to be forced to arrest the same individuals, sometimes for the same crimes, while they await trial on the previous charges,” Trump wrote in his order. “This is a waste of public resources and a threat to public safety.”
Trump signed a separate order specifically for Washington, D.C., that directs the newly formed D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force to “work to ensure that arrestees in the District of Columbia are held in Federal custody to the fullest extent permissible” and to pursue “pretrial detention for such arrestees whenever possible.”
It also directs Bondi to work with federal agencies to “identify appropriate actions to press the District of Columbia to change its policies with respect to cashless bail.”
Trump wrote in the D.C.-specific order that cashless bail policies allow “criminals free to endanger American citizens visiting our Nation’s capital, Federal workers discharging their duties to our Nation, and citizens of the District of Columbia trying to live their lives safely.”
The president signed a sweeping public safety emergency declaration in Washington, D.C., earlier this month that has allowed the federal takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department and the deployment of hundreds of National Guard troops in the nation’s capital. The Trump administration has additionally sent in law enforcement officers from various federal agencies, including those under the Justice Department, like the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Department of Homeland Security, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement. --->READ MORE HERE
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