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NY Post says NYC might continue its assault on common sense.
Here’s an up-close look at a quality-of-life offense the City Council wants to decriminalize.
This urinating vagrant turned a busy stretch of Broadway into his own private bathroom yesterday – an offense that would result in a mere summons if Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and her pals get their way.
Wrapped in rags and a Mets blanket the hobo wandered into traffic at around 10:30 a.m. and relieved himself as cabs, cars and buses whizzed by between West 83rd and 84th streets on the Upper West Side.
He finished his business at a nearby garbage bin, then strolled back to the front of a Victoria’s Secret store at Broadway and 85th Street, where he camped out for the rest of the day.
Mark-Viverito in April announced plans to decriminalize public urination along with five other low-level offenses: biking on the sidewalk, public consumption of alcohol, being in a park after dark, failure to obey a park sign and jumping subway turnstiles.
Police Commissioner Bill Bratton — who in the early ’90s implemented a “broken windows” approach to policing to dramatically cut crime — is against the new plan, saying such offenses lead to more serious crimes.
Speaking of cities, David Harsanyi says “sanctuary cities” are the worst kind of liberal lawlessness.
So let me get this straight: America is thrown into an overwrought political debate about the Confederate battle flag—a relic that has absolutely nothing to do with the shooting in Charleston—but is unwilling to engage in a conversation about the deliberate disregard of federal law that directly leads to the murder of at least one young woman?
That’s basically where we stand. After sending mixed signals, The Hill reports that Democrats will be making a concerted effort to defend San Francisco’s sanctuary laws and killing of Kathryn Steinle along the city’s famous waterfront. Most Republicans will avoid the matter altogether for the sake of political expediency. Soon enough, I imagine, it’ll be xenophobic to bring it up at all. One of these conversations, after all, is risk-free, jammed with self-satisfying preening about the right sort of evils. The other, morally complex—especially for the supporters of immigration reform (like myself)—and fraught with electoral consequences.
But let’s set aside immigration politics for a moment and consider a detail that’s often lost in this debate: Fact is, some people in America are free to ignore laws they don’t like, while others are not. Hundreds of jurisdictions nullify federal immigration law, not because they question the constitutionality of law, but because they find those laws ideologically problematic and immoral. And when I say “some” jurisdictions, I mean entirely liberal ones.
When Alabama made noises about refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, the incident was, rightly, treated as attack on the rule of law. There is simply no way the administration will allow any state to work around centralized control once it’s established. No city in America will be ignoring gay marriage any more than they will be bypassing Environmental Protection Agency control, or making health-care insurance decisions that aren’t dictated by Obamacare (or retroactively whatever Democrats claim they meant in Obamacare), or welfare policy decisions that aren’t dictated by Washington, or housing decisions that undermine the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or education policy that directly conflicts with the wishes of the U.S. Department of Education. And so on. …
John Hinderaker posts on the administration’s efforts to grease the skids for the creation of those sanctuary cities.
In the wake of the murder of Kathryn Steinle–or, rather, the news coverage of her murder–Democrats are back-pedaling from their longstanding and consistent support for “sanctuary” cities. When asked about the issue, Hillary Clinton followed her usual policy: she lied.
Clinton chided law enforcement officials in an interview with CNN, saying the city was wrong to ignore an Immigration and Customs Enforcement request to hold Francisco Sanchez for federal authorities. Sanchez is accused of killing a young California woman along a pier last week.
“The city made a mistake, not to deport someone that the federal government strongly felt should be deported,” Clinton said. “So I have absolutely no support for a city that ignores the strong evidence that should be acted on.”
In fact, the Obama administration which Clinton served for four long years is responsible for destroying the system whereby federal authorities request that state agencies detain illegal immigrants. The relevant law is not at all ambiguous. If the feds ask a state agency to detain an illegal alien, the state authorities are required to do so:
Upon a determination by the Department to issue a detainer for an alien not otherwise detained by a criminal justice agency, such agency shall maintain custody of the alien for a period not to exceed 48 hours … in order to permit assumption of custody by the Department.
Rich Lowry explains how the Obama administration deliberately gutted its own legal authority to have illegal aliens detained: …
Scott Johnson posts on another lawless liberal.
After Dylann Roof murdered nine pastors and churchgoers in the course of Bible study in Charleston, President Obama couldn’t wait to use the occasion for his narrow political purposes. “Let’s be clear,” he said with urgency in his voice. “At some point we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence … doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it.” The implication, of course, was that additional gun control legislation was required but that his political opponents refused to see the light.
Now we learn in whose power it was to do something about it, and it wasn’t anyone Obama was talking about. The Washington Post reports: “Dylann Roof, who is accused of killing nine people at a church in South Carolina three weeks ago, was only able to purchase the gun used in the attack because of breakdowns in the FBI’s background-check system, FBI Director James B. Comey said Friday.” The White House, of course, declines to comment.
If there has ever been a smaller man or bigger jerk than Barack Obama holding the office of president, we need to know now.