It's a rare moment that we can place a time stamp on a U.S. president's worst decision. But in the case of Joe Biden, we can thank politics-by-Twitter for the ability to write definitively that the dumbest move —both governmentally and politically — by our 46th POTUS is the unforced error that he committed at 3:33 p.m. last Thursday.
"I support D.C. Statehood and home-rule — but I don't support some of the changes D.C. Council put forward over the Mayor's objections — such as lowering penalties for carjackings," Biden posted on Twitter. "If the Senate votes to overturn what D.C. Council did — I'll sign it."
Before that moment, it's safe to say that most Americans outside of Washington had been paying attention to other issues — like the toxic train derailment in Ohio, or the war in Ukraine — than what had been a largely local fight over modernizing the criminal code in our nation's capital. And to the extent that any voters did know anything about the squabble, it was the Fox News-fried talking point that threw this issue before Congress in the first place — the claim that soft-on-crime Democrats are making life easier for carjackers.
Biden's announcement last Thursday that he will govern according to the twisted right-wing version of reality — as opposed to the actual realities of both "home rule" as well as what the D.C. crime measure actually does — is deeply depressing. Not only is it a bad decision with even worse "optics" — a white president throwing out a law enacted by a Black-majority city council — but coupled with a parallel right turn in immigration, it reveals a Biden administration backing what's politically expedient over what's right, just as the 2024 election draws closer.
The decision is also so discouraging because Biden has been on something of a roll lately — seeing his approval rating bounce back to its highest level since the early months of his presidency — mainly for showing America what a liberal-leaning government can accomplish in the 2020s: lowering both unemployment and the cost of insulin, pushing new semiconductor factories in the Rust Belt, fighting for student debt relief.
But this D.C. ploy feels like a throwback to the 1990s Joe Biden — the guy who wrote the disastrous 1994 federal crime measure linked to the rise in mass incarceration, in another moment when cowed Democrats fearful of losing a presidential election endorsed conservative tropes rather than challenging them. But what makes the timing of Biden's 2023 "throwback Thursday" so bizarre is that Fox News — the generator of bogus talking points, especially around urban crime — is currently imploding. The stunning revelation of the network's 2020 texts and emails proving it didn't believe the Donald Trump election lies it was promoting on the air reveals Rupert Murdoch's outfit as more of a political racketeering scheme than a news organization.
So why would Democrats — not just Biden, but other party stalwarts like Pennsylvania's senior senator, Bob Casey — play into Fox-style disinformation about the crime bill?
The quick version of the backstory: Officials in Washington have been working for more than a decade on a bottom-to-top overhaul of its outdated, poorly written criminal code — in part because judges were complaining about its flaws and contradictions. The new code passed D.C. Council without controversy, but then some pundits — with pandemic-era spikes in some crimes like murder and carjacking becoming a hot-button issue — criticized some changes they argued seemed too lenient. The chatter swayed D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser — an old-line Democrat, not a progressive — to veto the bill, but the D.C. Council members who understood best what the law actually does overrode her veto in a 12-1 vote.
Republicans, who've made the notions that Democrats are "soft on crime" and want to "defund the police" (spoiler alert: They don't) a core political message, and who just gained narrow control in the House, saw opportunity in the constitutional right of the federal government to have the final say on ruling the District of Columbia — to the chagrin of D.C. officials and residents. Their bill to override the D.C. Council, which under the current law passed in the 1970s needs just a simple majority, has passed in the House and now seems certain to gain Senate approval.
The 173 House Democrats who stuck their necks out and opposed the move — fully expecting Biden to veto a GOP-generated bill — are furious with the president, whose move will now make them more vulnerable to the "soft-on-crime" trope. I understand their anger, and I can also understand why the loudest objections have been to Biden's nonsensically illogical claim that he "supports D.C. home rule" even as he undermines it.
Even Mayor Bowser — whose overridden veto is cited as the key reason for Republicans and now Biden to back this measure — was disappointed by the president's announcement, "Until we are the 51st state, we live with that indignity," she said. Indeed, it's bad enough that Biden has placed himself on the side of an increasingly radical GOP and against the self-governance of any major U.S. city, but especially one with a majority Black population.
That's a body blow to Washingtonians who dared to allow their hopes for statehood to rise along with narrow Democratic control of Congress, and the White House, in 2021. That the issue at hand is a reminder of Biden's 1990s crime stance that made some Black voters wary in 2020 only rubs salt on a self-inflicted wound.
But here's where it gets even worse. Biden — as Democrats so often have done, going back to the time of Ronald Reagan — is embracing the right's bumper-sticker definition of the bill, rather than standing up for the more complicated and nuanced reality of what it actually does. I would urge anyone wanting to know more about the D.C. crime overhaul to read Mark Joseph Stern's Slate.com takedown of the "cynical freakout" over the law.
"The D.C. bill is not a liberal wishlist of soft-on-crime policies," Stern writes. "It is an exhaustive and entirely mainstream blueprint for a more coherent and consistent legal system." In a lengthy piece, he walks readers through the 16-year process in which the bill was drafted with considerable input from state and local prosecutors, hardly the mark of a far-left, empty-the-jails measure. He notes that the vagueness of the old code actually made it harder to prosecute some crimes.
But what of the language around carjacking, which has become the 10-second sound bite against the bill? Stern notes that the old law's maximum sentence of 40 years was out of sync both with the penalties for other crimes and what judges now are sentencing, typically no more than 15 years. So the new law's maximum of 24 years is still nine years longer than what D.C. judges are actually sending convicted criminals away for.
Of course, Stern's patient explanation of the law is roughly 2,500 words, while Biden's Twitter interpretation is only six words. That's the problem with bumper-sticker politics, which has been flummoxing Democrats for the last 40 years. If they can't beat back bogus memes now — with Fox on the run, to borrow a phrase —will they ever learn?
Of course carjacking is a serious problem in big cities like Washington and Philadelphia. But this silly sideshow over a never-to-be-imposed maximum sentence of 40 years, versus 24 years, won't stop a single incidence of that awful crime. The actual work of making the public safer — funding anti-violence programs that are more effective than rote, occupation-style policing, or making conditions better in the neighborhoods where crime festers — gets ignored for the current nonsense.
This is a pivotal time. Both Biden's stronger focus on 2024 and recent White House shake-ups — including the departure of chief of staff Ron Klain, who listened to the party's further-left base and might have stopped this move — seem to be rekindling Biden's worst 20th-century political instincts. It started with his constant invocations of "Fund the police!" even though throwing more money at overfunded cops is the wrong solution. At the border, Biden seems willing to embrace Trump-era policies — even though Fox News will rip him no matter what he does.
Look, I know the feeling among Democrats that it's counterproductive to criticize Biden in any way when the threat of bona fide fascism from his 2024 rivals Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is more real than ever. I get that, but Biden will struggle to win next year if he's not the best president he can be, and if he alienates core voters — like Black people who live in cities. When Biden ran in 2020, he essentially apologized to those voters for supporting the 1994 crime bill. At age 80, he might not be around to apologize for the results of this mistake — so why not avoid it in the first place?
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