Kudos to Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser for pushing to roll back criminal justice reforms she once backed.
Too bad President Joe Biden passed on the chance to block them.
The background: In the wake of the George Floyd protests in 2020, Bowser the next year signed onto a sweeping temporary package of laws that limited police use of force, reduced union representation in disciplinary hearings, mandated anti-racism and anti-white-supremacy training and more.
In 2022, the radical City Council passed a permanent version; Bowser criticized but did not veto it.
Then bipartisan majorities in the US House and Senate voted to override (Congress has that right for all DC statutes) — but Biden refused to go along, as he was still pandering to the left on crime.
This year, he did agree to override another extreme DC “reform” — plainly because soaring crime has voters in an uproar nationwide.
The issue’s big in DC, too: Homicides are up 33% year over year; robberies, 70% and overall violent crime, 41%. The town’s also plagued by shoplifting rings and open-air drug markets.
And morale in the city’s police force has plummeted.
Hence Bowser’s call to repeal the 2022 law, which she says was “well-intentioned” but made communities “less safe,” as local thugs now believe “you can commit a brazen crime and get away with it.”
For the sake of all the innocent, law-abiding folks in the nation’s capital, let’s hope DC’s progressives show more sense than the ones in New York’s Legislature.
