Weeks After Midterms, Top Senate Democrat Suggests Defunding Police in 60 Percent of US Counties
It’s an obvious truism that elections have consequences — but those consequences may not be as consequential as Sen. Chris Murphy appears to think.
Less than three weeks after midterm elections that allowed the Connecticut senator’s Democratic Party to maintain control of the Senate by a razor-thin margin — either the same margin they held prior to Nov. 8 or one more vote, depending on how next week’s Georgia run-off turns out — Murphy seems to think that the federal government is somehow more empowered to implement President Joe Biden’s leftist political and social agenda.
Granted that the midterms didn’t end the way Republicans were hoping, the fact is that the House is now in GOP hands and Biden’s agenda is largely going to be DOA on Capitol Hill for the next two years.
Murphy isn’t trying to hear that.
“I want to ask you about what you did pass,” he was asked by CNN’s Dana Bash Sunday on “State of the Union” during a conversation about gun control and a so-called assault weapons ban. “You mentioned it. Five months, it’s been that long since the president signed a bipartisan bill.
“You helped negotiate it. It expanded background checks, incentivized — incentivized states to implement red flag laws. Virginia and Colorado, where these mass shootings took place over the last 10 days or so, they already have red flag laws in place, and they did not prevent those mass shootings.”
It was a fair question, and Murphy tried to dodge it. To her credit, although Bash was generally cooperative during an interview in which Murphy made a lot of questionable statements that she declined to question, she didn’t let him get away with this one.
“I think it’s important to know that the bill that we passed is being implemented as we speak,” Murphy said in a statement that didn’t apply to Virginia or Colorado at all. “But it takes a little while for these big, complicated laws to be put into place.”
“But these two states already had — they didn’t need the incentives,” Bash noted, forcing Murphy to respond in a more meaningful way by actually revealing his agenda for states and counties that doesn’t do what he thinks they should.
“Correct. Correct,” he said. “Now, what we have, I think, learned in Colorado is that the county in which the shooting happened is a so-called Second Amendment sanctuary state. And I think the country is going to have to learn about what’s going on in this country. The majority of counties in this country have declared that they are not going to enforce state and federal gun laws. They have decided that they are going to essentially refuse to implement laws that are on the books. That is a growing problem in this country.”
One wonders whether he thinks it’s a “growing problem” when state and local officials refuse to enforce federal immigration laws. Actually, one doesn’t wonder. One’s pretty sure one knows.
“And I think we’re going to have to have a conversation about that in the United States Senate,” Murphy continued. “Do we want to continue to supply funding to law enforcement in counties that refuse to implement state and federal gun laws? Red flag laws are wildly popular, right? You’re just temporarily taking guns away from people that –”
Again to her credit, Bash interrupted the senator in an attempt to get him on the record regarding what he had just actually proposed — defunding law enforcement in more than half the country.
“So, you want to withhold money for law enforcement?” she asked.
“I think we have to have a conversation about whether we can continue to fund law enforcement in states where they are refusing to implement these gun laws,” Murphy responded, which amounted to a very long-winded way to say, “yes.”
“I will talk to my colleagues about what our approach should be to this problem, but 60 percent of counties in this country are refusing to implement the nation’s gun laws,” he said. “We have got to do something about that.”
You can see the segment here:
The fact of the matter is that Murphy and his Democratic colleagues in the federal government can do what he’s proposing here, assuming they can round up the votes. (That’s going to be problematic, at best, but that’s another subject.)
Federal budgets are written in such a way as to allow the federal government to control — or, at least, strongly influence — state, country and local officials in time-honored fashion: bribery. I’d love to say that this is something Democrats are guilty of exclusively, but it’s an establishment system used by Democrats and Republicans alike. Tax the people and then use that money as bribes to get what they want.
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government,” Elmer Peterson wrote in 1951. “It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.”
(Peterson claimed to be quoting Alexander Fraser Tyler, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. There’s also the often-quoted truism “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money,” supposedly from Alexis de Tocqueville. It’s a fantastic quote, its only flaw being that Tocqueville never said it.)
In a federal government as byzantine as we have allowed ours to become, the party in power can use our own tax dollars to coerce the American people to do whatever it thinks is best — enforcing unconstitutional gun laws, not enforcing immigration laws, or anything in between.
The solution to that isn’t voting for Republicans, although that may temporarily slow the bleeding a little. The only lasting solution will be a dramatic reduction in size of the federal government and a return of power to the states, counties, towns and people.
That would require a herculean effort — a miracle, almost.
And it’s a result leftists like Chris Murphy will fight tooth-and-nail to stave off.
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