The Patriot Post® · Democrats Dismiss NYC Crime Victims
We’ll say this about House Republicans: They’ve upped their marketing game.
We don’t say this as a disparagement; we mean it as a compliment. And we say it because yesterday, members of the House Judiciary Committee headed up to Federal Plaza in Manhattan, there to hold a “field hearing” — and to thereby shine a bright light on the soft-on-crime policies of Soros-funded New York City District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
The four-hour hearing was the second of its kind in recent weeks, with the first involving a field trip to McAllen, Texas — right on the border, right in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley, right where the nation’s illegal immigration catastrophe is at its worst. And it might be that Republicans are beginning to get under the skin of their Democrat colleagues because while Democrats skipped the border hearing in March, they attended this one.
Of course, it may simply be that woke, wealthy, elitist Democrats feel much more at home in tony Manhattan than they do in hardscrabble McAllen.
In any case, this examination of the Democrats’ “pro-crime, anti-victim” policies was led by Ohio Republican and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, and it featured numerous real-life victims of violent crime, which has surged in Democrat-run cities nationwide, and particularly in New York City under the successive Democrat leadership of former Mayor Bill de Blasio and current Mayor Eric Adams.
New York City has “lost its way when it comes to fighting crime and upholding the law,” said Jordan. “Here in Manhattan, the scales of justice are weighed down by politics. For the district attorney justice isn’t blind — it’s about advancing opportunities to promote a political agenda — a radical political agenda.”
Toward the beginning of the hearing, committee members heard impact statements from several city residents who’ve experienced violent crime up close and personally. Democrat New York City Council member Robert F. Holden also spoke, and he criticized Bragg’s policies.
“On his first day in office, Bragg issued a memo that would decriminalize a broad range of offenses and reduce charges for violent crime,” Holden said. “This was a signal for every criminal that it was open season on law-abiding citizens in New York. … These failed progressive policies reverse 30 years of law and order delivered to the city by the hardworking men and women of the NYPD and professional prosecutors that put victims’ rights ahead of criminals.”
Predictably, Democrats and their colleagues at The New York Times denounced the hearing as a “junket,” a “sham,” a “stunt,” a “MAGA Broadway production,” and an “outrageous abuse of power.” They even called it “an exercise in retribution directed at the prosecutor who indicted the former president on 34 [redundant and ridiculous] felony counts earlier this month” — which is an odd characterization, given that Trump-deranged Democrats mentioned the former president’s name 38 times, while Republican committee members didn’t utter his name even once.
Indeed, New York Democrat Congressman Daniel Goodman called the hearing “a charade” to protect Trump. But Madeline Brame, a witness whose Army veteran son was fatally stabbed nine times in 2018, wasn’t in any mood for it. “Don’t insult my intelligence,” she said. “This is why I walked away from the plantation of the Democratic Party.”
We can’t imagine losing a child to a violent crime, but this woman has lived it. And the Democrats dismissed her testimony as part of a charade. Shame on them. What is it that Democrats always say about “moral authority”? Or does that only apply when the witness is one of their own?
“Victims can care less about anyone’s political ideology or party,” Brame said. “Neither do criminals. They don’t roll up to a person and ask them if they’re a Democrat or a Republican before they bust them in the head, or before they push them in front of the train, or before they stab them to death.”
In addition to the Times’s Praetorian Guardsmen, the Democrats also had the usual “fact-checking” suspects out in their defense yesterday. One of their pet peeves is when we mention, rightly, that Alvin Bragg is a Soros-funded DA.
Our Nate Jackson fact-checked this fact-check recently, and it turns out that an anti-police group called the Color of Change PAC announced in May 2021 that it was backing Bragg’s candidacy for DA with $1 million. And it also turns out that, days later, George Soros cut Color of Change a check for $1 million.
Mere coincidence? We think not. “Anyone can see exactly what happened here,” said another fact-checking fact-checker, columnist Matt Palumbo, “yet the fact-checkers were more than happy to further demolish their credibility in arguing the contrary with pure semantics. The fact-checker’s case that Soros didn’t fund Bragg amounts to nothing more than ‘Soros didn’t fund him — the PAC did!’”
“Experts say no legal link between Soros donation, Bragg,” say the fact-checking experts at The Washington Post and PolitiFact and elsewhere.
To which we say: What would we do without experts? And what would New York City’s criminal class do without a soft-on-crime Soros DA like Alvin Bragg?
Updated to include an additional quote from Madeline Brame.