Feehery: Crime and punishment; law and order 

It doesn’t take a reading of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s famous novel to understand that crime and punishment in modern-day America is seriously out of whack. 

President Biden announced the other day that he was going to pardon all those Americans with federal convictions of illegal pot possession, which is pretty funny because currently there is nobody in federal prison for illegal pot possession. 

Getting credit for releasing nobody from federal prison is part and parcel of the Democrats’ Achilles’ heel in the midterm elections. Try as they might, they can’t run away from their home-grown “defund the police” movement.  

Bill Clinton had a pretty simple and effective message when he ran for reelection in 1996: He put more cops on the street and locked up as many criminals as he could. 

In the old days, Biden would have claimed credit for Clinton’s success. After all, he was chairman of the Judiciary Committee when Clinton’s crime bill was signed into law in 1994. 

But the newly woke Democratic Party has turned its back on Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton herself was forced to renounce her husband’s efforts to put criminals behind bars when she ran for president in 2016. Biden similarly had to bend a knee to the BLM movement in the wake of the George Floyd death and subsequent violent riots that engulfed America.  

In D.C., we have a Black Lives Matter Plaza in front of the White House, but we don’t have functional control of the streets. Outside my office, people are smoking crack and gunshots are a regular feature on the streets of my Capitol Hill neighborhood. Our local ward committeeman, Charles Allen, is a defund-the-police kind of guy who supports the whole liberal agenda of letting criminals out of jail and having more compassion for the perpetrators than the victims.  

I live in the District, so I know — it is highly unlikely that a Republican here can beat a white progressive like Allen who promises more of the same nonsense when it comes to fighting crime. But in other places, being on the right side of the crime and punishment issue will help propel Republicans to victory.  

In Pennsylvania, for example, Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman (who didn’t make a living on his own until he was in his 40s) has a track record of letting violent criminals out of jail. That doesn’t play well in crime-ridden Philadelphia or anywhere else in the Quaker State. 

In Wisconsin, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson has rightfully pounded Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes on his embrace of the “defund the police” movement. This message resonates in Milwaukee, which has faced a crippling crime wave for years now, and in places like Kenosha, which was ground zero for protest violence. 

In Minnesota, Democratic Rep. Angie Craig’s largely suburban voters are tired of the anarchy that has sprung from the defund-the-police movement, and she is facing long odds in winning reelection.  

Even in the Pacific Northwest, the desire for law and order is making Democrats think twice about voting for other long-time Democrats. Sen. Patty Murray is in serious trouble in Washington state as voters lament the decline of Seattle because of out-of-control crime. In Oregon, Republican Christine Drazan is leading Tina Kotek, the Democratic candidate, in the race for governor, mostly because voters blame the Democrats for what happened in Portland and its casual embrace of anarchy. 

Most polls have crime as a top issue of concern for the voters. This doesn’t bode well for Democrats who have grown soft on crime as they move to embrace the radical “defund the police” mentality. 

Feehery is a partner at EFB Advocacy and blogs at thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), as communications director to former House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and as a speechwriter to former House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).