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President Joe Biden is siding with Republicans and moderate Democrats to slap down local leaders of Washington, DC, as they try to update a 100-year-old criminal code that is showing its age.
Progressive Democrats are furious about the message this sends on criminal justice reform, and some DC residents feel betrayed by the president who lives in their midst.
But the headline version of this story, while it neatly fits the Republican political narrative that American cities are crime-infested and rotting, is incomplete.
Except for Biden’s move betraying DC residents who want to govern themselves. That part is hard to argue with.
The basic points are these:
DC’s local government has been trying for years to update its antiquated criminal code, much of which was written before anyone alive today was born.
For more on just how old and bizarre some of DC’s criminal laws sound today, I recommend reading this story from DCist’s Martin Austermuhle. He mentions laws about archaic stickball games being played in the city’s streets and regulating the movement of livestock through the city.
The criminal code reform passed by DC’s city council would have ended many mandatory minimum sentences and lowered sentence maximums, even for violent crimes like carjackings.
The updates have split local leaders on the council, which is dominated by Democrats. The most notable opponent of the new criminal code is DC’s Democratic mayor Muriel Bowser, no ally of national Republicans. In fact, DC’s council overrode her veto of the proposal earlier this year.
Bowser agrees with most of the measures but has questioned the lowering of some maximum sentences and greatly increasing the…
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