States with Republican-led legislatures are beginning to take action to get around soft-on-crime prosecutors and elected officials in their blue cities by making end runs around them to implement a crackdown on crime without their help.
Very few large cities in the United States have ever had much by way of Republican leadership, even those in strong red states. Tennessee, for instance, is as red as they come, but Nashville has not had a single Republican mayor since Metropolitan Nashville was consolidated in 1963. The last Republican mayor of New Orleans was Benjamin Flanders, who left office in 1872. St. Louis, Missouri’s, last GOP mayor left office in 1949. Louisville, Kentucky’s, last GOP mayor’s term ended in 1969. Jackson, Mississippi, has never had a Republican mayor. Houston, Texas, has only had two GOP mayors since 1929. And on and on it goes.
Many of these cities currently have far-left leadership and even further-left local prosecutors, all of whom are soft on crime and oppose President Trump’s efforts to crack down on crime and to arrest and deport illegal aliens.
Indeed, the endemic crime in America’s big cities has given hypocritical Democrats a talking point. When president Trump has pointed to the crime in blue states, many Democrats and their lapdogs in the media have pointed to the “crime in red states” to somehow show that Trump’s focus on blue state crime is wrongheaded. Unsurprisingly, much of the crime in red states is located in the Democrat-run cities within those states.
With this in mind, a growing number of red states are beginning to tire of the soft-on-crime Democrats running the big cities in their red states and are taking a variety of actions to circumvent those Democrat regimes that are turning their cities into nests of out-of-control crime.
The Washington Post reported that state legislatures are taking a more direct hand to curb crime in cities such as Jackson, Mississippi; Houston, Texas; New Orleans, Louisiana; St. Louis, Missouri, and others — and ignoring the feckless local officials.
The Mississippi state legislature, for instance, has invested heavily in new court operations to more quickly prosecute and jail suspects who are charged with state crimes in Jackson, thereby taking a load of cases off the hands of the Harris County courts. The state has also implemented a large expansion of the state police and empowered them to enforce the law in Jackson, even if the city-controlled police department doesn’t want to do so.
The Republican-led legislature in Missouri has decided to take control of the St. Louis Police Department and created a law to allow the Republican governor of the state to appoint a special prosecutor to begin putting more criminals in jail despite what local officials want to do.
Texas and Louisiana have also taken action to bring in their respective National Guard troops to restore order in Houston and New Orleans, and Louisiana’s red legislature even brought the state police into New Orleans to augment the city’s Democrat-led police department.
Georgia and Indiana have also opted to direct the state police to step up their presence in their Democrat-led cities and to amp up the crackdown on crime whether the locals want to help or not.
The leaders of these red states are responding to the voters, who are generally supportive of stronger efforts on crime. But Democrats are decrying these efforts as taking away their local control, not to mention any financial resources that might have been diverted from the Democrat cities to the state legislatures to pay for their ramped-up actions to circumvent local leadership’s refusal to act to make their cities safer.
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