The Patriot Post® · San Franciscans Recall Defective DA

Everyone has a breaking point, and it appears that San Franciscans have finally reached theirs.

The homeless encampments, the drug-addled denizens, the poop patrols, the sweet-n-sour stench of urine in Union Square — all of these seemed somehow acceptable to the city’s residents. But yesterday, the people of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s district sent a resounding message about law and order to the soft-on-crime leftists who’ve helped wreck that once magnificent city. As the “progressive” New York Times grimly reports:

Voters in San Francisco on Tuesday put an end to one of the country’s most pioneering experiments in criminal justice reform, ousting a district attorney who eliminated cash bail, vowed to hold police accountable and worked to reduce the number of people sent to prison.

Chesa Boudin, the progressive district attorney, was removed after two and a half years in office, according to The Associated Press, in a vote that is set to reverberate through Democratic politics nationwide as the party fine-tunes its messaging on crime before midterm elections that threaten to strip Democratic control over Congress.

Uh, “fine-tunes its messaging”? If that’s all Democrats think they need to do, they’re in for the Mother of All Shellackings on November 8, the date of this year’s midterm elections. Boudin wasn’t nipped, wasn’t narrowly beaten; he was trounced 61-39 in one of the leftmost enclaves in America.

Not even the lefties at The Washington Post could defend Boudin’s record. “More people died in San Francisco last year from fentanyl overdoses than covid-19,” the Post’s James Hohmann wrote, “yet District Attorney Chesa Boudin did not convict a single person in 2021 for dealing the lethal opioid.”

Moreover: “Boudin’s office convicted just three people for the charge of ‘possession with intent to sell’ in 2021 — for meth, heroin and cocaine. His predecessor secured more than 90 drug-dealing convictions in 2018.”

Who knew? Elections have consequences.

And so, the people of San Francisco soon got sick of all this, er, stuff: sick of the rapes, the robberies, the muggings, the murders, the shoplifting, the burglaries, and the open-air drug trade. And Asian Americans, who make up a full third of the city’s residents, no doubt got sick of being victims of the hate crime that dare not speak its name: the black-on-Asian variety.

This, remember, was Chesa Boudin, the child of David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, two members of the radical Weather Underground who in 1981, when their son was just 14 months old, left him with a babysitter so they could help rob an armored car. As NBC News reports, “It became one of New York’s most notorious botched heists, a crime that left two police officers and a Brink’s truck guard dead in a New York suburb.”

Essentially orphaned with his parents having been sentenced to decades in prison, Baby Chesa was instead raised by Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn. Naturally, he went to Yale and then to Oxford before winding up as — we kid you not — a translator for the late Venezuelan socialist dictator, Hugo Chavez. If that pedigree and those credentials don’t qualify a young man for cracking down on crime, we don’t know what does.

To be clear, Boudin was recalled by his fellow Democrats. “In San Francisco, you don’t know anybody who hasn’t had their car broken into,” said Mary Jung, the former chair of the Democratic Party in San Francisco and the head of the campaign to recall Mr. Boudin. “We feel heard,” she said. “San Francisco needed a change and this is just really a validation of what a lot of us were feeling.”

This reality, though, didn’t stop Boudin from blaming those rarest of Bay Area creatures, “the right-wing billionaires [who] outspent us three to one.” He says this nefarious cadre “created an electoral dynamic where we were literally shadowboxing.”

If Chesa Boudin was literally shadowboxing while his city went to hell, he deserved to lose. But he didn’t lose because of the money. He lost because of his soft-on-crime progressivism — as will Democrats all across the country come November.