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.
Since then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed on to the Empire State’s no-bail madness in 2019, New York City has seen countless perps nabbed for serious crimes but freed without bail — only to be hauled in again for new crimes soon after.
Like Enyerbert Blanco, a suspected Tren de Aragua gang member somehow set loose without bail after an attempted murder rap, then arrested on drug charges and freed again in Florida and finally hauled in a third time for sex-trafficking a 15-year-old New York City runaway.
Or the case of the serial shoplifter arrested a jaw-dropping 254 times but repeatedly let go on “supervised release.”
Some may complain of using a cutoff of federal funds as a cudgel against state laws, but that horse left the barn decade ago, and the left was all for it when President Barack Obama did it to push trans rights in school bathrooms and President Joe Biden did his own bullying over state abortion and labor laws.
As for the politics: Yes, most Americans want criminals behind bars.
After Albany imposed cashless bail, left-leaning New Yorkers blamed it for the crime surge by a margin of 64% to 24%.
And the president is entirely right to force national Democrats to take a stand on the substance here, to (we hope) disown this idiocy.
“I think the Democrats better get smart,” Trump advised Monday in the face of Gov. JB Pritzker’s whining over his new initiative, and he’s entirely right: Until they do, the voters won’t dare to give them any power in Washington again.
