Trump’s incredibly fake “crime” problem

As President Trump posed triumphantly for photos with police officers, government agents and members of the National Guard in Southeast Washington last week, lawyers across town in federal court grappled with his new brand of justice.

The stream of defendants who shuffled through a federal courtroom on Thursday afternoon illustrated the new ways in which laws are being enforced in the nation’s capital after the president’s takeover of the city’s police. They were appearing before a magistrate judge on charges that would typically be handled at the local court level, if they were filed at all.

One man had been arrested over an open container of alcohol. Another had been charged with threatening the president after delivering a drunken outburst following his arrest on vandalism. And one defendant’s gun case so alarmed prosecutors that they intend to drop the case.

Mr. Trump has cast his crackdown on crime as a success, and suggested on Friday that it was a blueprint he would seek to apply to other cities, including Chicago. To defense lawyers and even some prosecutors, though, many of the cases that have landed in court have raised concerns that the takeover seems intended to artificially inflate its effect because government lawyers have been instructed to file the most serious federal charges, no matter how minor the incident.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus Ignores Sola Fide; Prefers Loving Care For Community

Jesse is making heavy weather of 16th century theological notions that contributed to the formation of protestantism. Especially, lately, the principle known as sola fide, coined by Martin Luther. There are a few serious misreadings that Jesse has inherited but remains ignorant of: he’s not an educated scholar. Principally that Paul’s totalizing concern in the 1st century church was the escalating tension between the increasingly dominant gentile christian community and the original Jerusalem church of Jews. Paul was adamant that Christian gentiles not be made to observe Jewish law as necessary for redemption. 16th century Protestant reformation used this discourse of St Paul’s to critique the Roman emphasis on the call of faith to all christians to be actively willing disciples and join in the caring for community that is at the heart of Christian practice. Luther began the effort to elasticize St Paul’s dialectic of Law into an attack on 16th century Catholic moral systems of casuist...
Read more

Not a book

In John 14, Jesus makes clear that after him the Holy Spirit will come to us, as his disciples, to “teach us everything” and to build us up in love. No mention of a book. A lot of bible worshippers love idolatry. So what is scripture for? Exactly what it does: to point us to the Incarnation of God, Jesus the Christ, and to the sustainer of faith and love, God the Holy Spirit. With God the Father, then, scripture tells us to worship the Holy Trinity. Not itself. Scripture even itself encodes the teaching that faithful attention to God’s revelation will build wisdom beyond scripture: In Acts 11, Peter rushes back to Jerusalem to explain to the elders that he accepted Gentiles Christians only after the Holy Spirit has to berate him 3 times to so. “Now the apostles and the brethren who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God.  So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcision party criticized him,   saying, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men an...
Read more