“Biden will announce measures Wednesday to crack down on gun stores that don’t follow federal rules, step up programs for recently released convicts and provide more support for police departments across the country as the administration grapples with spikes in homicides and other violent crimes across major cities.
Though overall crime was down last year, according to FBI data, the murder rate rose about 25 percent and violent crime about 3 percent.”
“The worry over crime is real: It has created economic hardship, displacement and anxiety. But there are also tricky politics at play. The spike in crime has become a Republican talking point and has been a frequent topic of conversation on conservative media. … Biden also is trying to boost progressives’ efforts to reform policing, following a year of mass demonstrations and public anguish sparked by the killing by police of George Floyd and other Black people across the country. And while combating crime and reforming the police don’t have to be at odds with each other, the two efforts are increasingly billed that way.”
The Biden approach zeroes in on firearms, sales of which have surged over the past 18 months. Biden appears to lack the votes in Congress for major new restrictions on guns, but executive action is likely to unify Democrats, Annie notes.
“Biden will direct the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to seek to revoke licenses from gun sellers the first time they are caught willfully selling a weapon to a person who is not permitted to have one, neglecting to run a required background check or ignoring a federal request to provide trace information about a weapon used in a crime. The policy attacks a source of crime guns, which in some instances can be traced to sloppy or irresponsible dealers, experts say,” she reports.
But the strategy also calls for “opening opportunities to those leaving prison, including hiring more of them in federal jobs and encouraging business to do so. Biden also wants to offer additional federal housing vouchers for them, according to administration officials.
And Biden will allow $350 billion in federal stimulus funds to be used to pay to fund police departments in areas that have seen an increase in crime, administration officials said,” Annie writes.
Colleen, Jonathan and Michael report:
“While crime is rising — homicides and shootings are up from the same period last year in Chicago; Los Angeles; Minneapolis; Portland, Oregon; Baltimore; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Houston — violent crime overall remains lower than it was a decade ago or even five years ago. And most violent crimes plummeted during the first six months of the coronavirus pandemic, as people stayed indoors and away from others.
Crime started creeping up last summer, a trend criminologists say is hard to define and is likely due to a variety of factors such as historic unemployment, fear over the virus and mass anger over stay-at-home orders. Public mass shootings have also made an alarming return.”
But there’s no doubt voters worry about crime, which is near its lowest level in decades despite that year-long surge in murders and the country’s regular plague of mass shootings.
In March, the Gallup polling organization found 78 percent of Americans said they worried a “great deal” or a “fair amount” about crime and violence, while just 17 percent said “only a little” and 6 percent said “not at all.”
“[E]ven as coronavirus restrictions have been lifted and protests have quieted in recent months, the violence has not subsided. Indeed, it has continued to grow. And now, local leaders are grappling with a possibility they had long feared: that a decades-long era of declining murder rates in America’s cities may be over, and that the increased killings may be here to stay. … Officials and criminal justice experts offer abundant reasons: A nation awash in guns, now more than ever. Deep mistrust between police departments and the communities they serve, particularly in high-poverty areas. The still-painful stresses caused or exacerbated by the pandemic. A cycle of violence that, once set in motion, is hard to break.”
As exemplified by Biden’s approach, Democrats tend to blame the proliferation of firearms and economic ills for rising crime.
“Biden opposed defunding the police as the movement to do so grew in the summer before the 2020 election with support from many on the party’s left flank. Conservatives sought to tie him and fellow congressional Democrats to the movement, and a report commissioned by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) earlier this year showed that effort damaged the party, which lost significant ground in the House even as Biden won the presidency.”
We might not know who won New York City’s Democratic mayoral race primary for a while. The primary was left unsettled last night, with Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former police captain, appearing to have the advantage in the city’s first ranked-choice election, David Weigel and Jada Yuan report. “Final results are not expected until July 12, given both the city’s rickety election system and new ballots that allow voters to rank up to five candidates, allotting their choices until one candidate reaches a majority. While no winner can be declared until the end of a multipart count, the Adams campaign had suggested that it would amount to voter suppression if the candidate who had the most first-choice votes did not become mayor… Two other candidates trailed Adams in first-choice votes but hoped to prevail in the final allocation of ballots: civil rights attorney Maya Wiley and former city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia.”
Andrew Yang, the tech entrepreneur who gained notoriety for his failed 2020 presidential bid, came in a distant fourth in the New York City mayoral race. “He conceded the race on Tuesday night, saying he had no path to victory and thanking the voters who thought ‘politics as usual wasn’t working’ and took a chance on him.”
India Walton, a self-identified socialist, scored an upset victory in Buffalo’s mayoral primary. Walton, a nurse and activist, scored an upset victory over four-term incumbent Byron Brown last night, Weigel reports. Brown, who refused to debate Walton during the campaign, had not conceded the race by this morning. “Republicans have not fielded a candidate for mayor and have not won City Hall in Buffalo since the 1960s, making the Democratic primary winner all but certain to take office in January. If victorious when all ballots are counted, Walton will be Buffalo’s first female and first Black female mayor.”
Lunchtime reads from The Post
- “153 people resigned or were fired from a Texas hospital system after refusing to get vaccinated,” by Dan Diamond: “Houston Methodist — one of the first health systems to require the coronavirus shots — terminated or accepted the resignations of 153 workers Tuesday, spokeswoman Gale Smith said. … The hospital system announced April 1 that staffers would need to be vaccinated to keep their jobs. … Earlier this month, a federal district court judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by one of those employees, Jennifer Bridges, a former nurse who alleged the policy was unlawful and forced staffers to be ‘guinea pigs’ for vaccines.”
- ” ‘Rogue city leaders’: House Republicans are taking power away from mayors,” by Politico’s Liz Crampton: “Mayors and city councils across Arizona issued face mask mandates during the pandemic to prevent the spread of Covid-19, angering conservative state lawmakers who decried government overreach. So the legislators turned to the newest Republican playbook and passed a law allowing businesses to ignore those public health requirements. … The strategy used in Arizona has been employed with new intensity by Republicans in states like Texas, Florida and Georgia, where lawmakers over the past year passed legislation preempting the ability of city — and state — leaders to enforce their own regulations.”
- “Britney Spears quietly pushed for years to end her conservatorship,” by the New York Times’s Liz Day, Samantha Stark and Joe Coscarelli: “Her father and others involved in the conservatorship maintained that it was a smooth-running machine that had rescued her from a low point and benefited Ms. Spears, and that she could move to end it whenever she wanted. All the while, she stayed largely silent on the subject in public. But now, confidential court records obtained by The New York Times reveal that Ms. Spears, 39, expressed serious opposition to the conservatorship earlier and more often than had previously been known.”
Today we’re lunching with Kelly Ward Burton, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. The NDRC was among the leading organizations involved in the push for H.R. 1, the Democrats’ sweeping election overhaul bill that Republicans blocked yesterday. We talked to Burton on Monday about the NDRC’s plans to continue their fight for voter access, whether H.R. 1 passed or not. This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Alfaro: Why would you argue that voting reform is overdue in the country, especially with what we’ve seen since the last election?
Burton: What we’re seeing in the state legislatures are Republican elected officials who are taking extreme measures to manipulate the structure of our democracy, to protect their power at all costs, regardless of what the voters want. They are doing this with the justification of election protection, but what this really is about is who votes. This is different than just your standard back and forth between two parties, different from Democrats and Republicans trying to win elections. H.R. 1 is a practical solution to what we are seeing, not a theoretical debate to what might happen.
Alfaro: If the bill doesn’t pass, what comes next?
Burton: We have always had a comprehensive strategy on redistricting. We are in year five of a six-year plan to make sure the redistricting process is as fair as possible and to increase engagement from the public to make sure elected officials and commissioners and whoever is drawing state maps are doing it in the most fair and transparent way. We will continue on that strategy no matter what.
We fully anticipate, in the phase where Republicans try to gerrymander, we will be there to fight them in court and we will push back on any attempts to lock in gerrymandered maps. So we will do that, whether H.R. 1 happens or not.
Alfaro: What do you respond to criticism that H.R. 1 is too ambitious, or unfocused?
Burton: It’s the right bill at the right time. The structures of the bill address key elements that need to be protected within our democracy, whether it’s banning partisan gerrymandering, protecting the right to vote, or strengthening ethics.
Alfaro: Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) was on the fence on this bill. What do you think of the edits he suggested last week?
Burton: You’re seeing Sen. Manchin come to the table to try to find a bill that he could support. He believes this shouldn’t be a partisan issue, that these elements should be supported on both sides. And what we see on the data is that voters — Republican voters, Democratic voters, independent voters across the spectrum — they all support these provisions.
Alfaro: Why should some of the changes made to the voting process during the pandemic be made permanent?
Burton: What we saw with the pandemic were thoughtful elected officials, both Democrats and Republicans, making necessary changes to maximize participation. Because trying to make sure people go and participate in our democracy is a good thing. It’s good for both sides. That’s why you saw Republican elected officials in Georgia and other states make those changes. What you’re seeing now in the states is not just a rollback of those expanded rules from the pandemic, but an extreme rollback in voting access that is strategically targeted at certain voters. Now, those same officials who expanded voting access are now rolling that back because they saw how much their access to power is under threat.
Alfaro: There was a great story in Politico the other day about the case in Oregon, on Democrats ceding the authority to draw districts. Some say this is good because districts should be drawn independently. But what do you say about this argument when it is likely Republican-led states won’t do the same?
Burton: We just want the system to be safer. We want the rules to be clear. We don’t want the system to be manipulated by one side or the other. And we want the outcomes of our elections to be determined by the vote, not pre-determined by politicians and special interests. We’re not scared of the voters. Democrats are putting our money where our mouth is and when we want to reform systems in our democracy, to make them fairer so that either side could win.
Alfaro: What does H.R. 1 mean in terms of Biden’s global agenda? How does the U.S. push its message of global democracy when it can’t secure everyone’s right to vote at home?
Burton: It’s a very important part of us being able to be the leaders we want to be on the global stage. You saw that last week with President Biden’s trip to the G-7, telling everyone that America is back. It’s important that we lead by example. We were on a townhall earlier today with President Obama and he talked about how we must make sure we are living up to the ideals that we espouse on the global stage. Having a healthy democracy where the rules are clear and both parties are committed to the power being in voters’ hands is a key piece of that.
More on the voting rights fight
Following defeat of For the People Act, what’s next for its advocates?
- “Biden and Democratic leaders said the defeat was only the beginning of their drive to steer federal voting rights legislation into law, and vowed to redouble their efforts in the weeks ahead,” the Times’s Nicholas Fandos reports.
- “But the Republican blockade in the Senate left Democrats without a clear path forward, and without a means to beat back the restrictive voting laws racing through Republican-led states. For now, it will largely be left to the Justice Department to decide whether to challenge any of the state laws in court.”
“Make no mistake about it — it will not be the last time that voting rights comes up for a debate in the Senate,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said about Democrats’ fight for election reform. “We will not let it go. We will not let it die.”
States across the country are dropping barriers to voting, widening a stark geographic divide in ballot access.
- “More than half of U.S. states have lowered some barriers to voting since the 2020 election, making permanent practices that helped produce record voter turnout during the coronavirus pandemic — a striking countertrend to the passage of new restrictions in key Republican-controlled states this year,” Elise Viebeck reports. “The newly enacted laws in states from Vermont to California expand access to the voting process on a number of fronts.”
- “Some states restored voting rights to people with past felony convictions or expanded options for voters with disabilities, both long-standing priorities among advocates. And in Virginia, a new law requires localities to receive preapproval or feedback on voting changes as a shield against racial discrimination.”
- “The trend is not limited to blue states, though they have led the charge. Indiana and Kentucky made several significant changes this year, including expanding the availability of ballot drop-off locations and establishing processes for voters to correct certain errors that would otherwise invalidate their mail ballots. At least four red states created systems for voters to track their ballots through the mail.”
- “Legislative debates over restrictions are ongoing in key states such as Texas and Pennsylvania, leaving open the possibility that new limitations affecting millions more voters will still be enacted before the end of the year.”
- Eyes on Texas: Gov. Greg Abbott (R) set a special session of the Texas Legislature on the state’s voting bill starting July 8. “Abbott has already said that he plans to ask state lawmakers to work on two priority elections and bail bills that died in the final hours of the regular legislative session after House Democrats walked out of the chamber,” the Texas Tribune’s Cassandra Pollock reports.
Attorney General Merrick Garland backed away from a broad review of the Justice Department’s politicization during the Trump administration.
- Garland noted that “the department’s independent inspector general [Michael E. Horowitz] was already investigating related issues, including aggressive leak hunts and attempts to overturn the election,” Katie Benner reports.
- “Democrats and some former Justice Department employees have pressed Mr. Garland to uncover any efforts by Trump to wield the power of federal law enforcement to advance his personal agenda. … Answering questions from reporters at the Justice Department on Tuesday, Mr. Garland said that reviewing the previous administration’s actions was ‘a complicated question.’ … ‘I don’t want the department’s career people to think that a new group comes in and immediately applies a political lens,’ Garland said.”
Manchin is open to Biden’s “human infrastructure” plan and undoing some Trump tax cuts.
- “I’ve come to the knowledge, basically, that budget reconciliation is for reconciling budgets. So it’s money matters,” Manchin told NBC News, calling for bolstering “human infrastructure.”
Biden nominees continue facing Senate blockades — from both sides.
- “Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is impeding the confirmation of James Kvaal, Biden’s pick to head higher-education policy at the Education Department, to secure commitments on student loan reforms,” Danielle Douglas-Gabriel reports. “Warren’s strategy is creating tensions among Democrats who see Kvaal’s leadership as key to executing Biden’s higher-education agenda.”
- “After the evenly divided chamber tied along party lines, Vice President Harris cast a tiebreaking vote to confirm Kiran Ahuja, the first of Biden’s nominees for which the vice president had to break an impasse,” Lisa Rein and Seung Min Kim report. Republicans pushed back on Ahuja for her past embrace of the theory of systemic racism known as critical race theory and for her support for abortion rights.
Germany and France want the E.U. to invite Russia to their summit.
- Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron made the surprise last-minute proposal that could lead to Vladimir Putin’s first meeting with E.U. leaders since 2014, the Financial Times’s Sam Fleming, Valentina Pop, Mehreen Khan and Michael Peel report.
- “Germany is of the view that the Biden-Putin summit provides a template for reviving relations with Russia. Merkel meets Putin regularly but advocates finding a format that allows the EU to speak with one voice on Russia.”
Saudi operatives who killed Jamal Khashoggi received paramilitary training in the U.S.
- “Four Saudis who participated in the 2018 killing of Post journalist Khashoggi received paramilitary training in the United States the previous year under a contract approved by the State Department, according to documents and people familiar with the arrangement,” the Times’s Mark Mazzetti, Julian Barnes and Michael LaForgia report. “The instruction occurred as the secret unit responsible for Mr. Khashoggi’s killing was beginning an extensive campaign of kidnapping, detention and torture of Saudi citizens ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.”
- The Times reporting confirms work by our colleague David Ignatius, who in a 2019 column first reported that members of the Khashoggi kill team received U.S. training.
Russia says it fired warning shots at a U.K. warship. London says no.
- “Russia said it used bombs and gunfire in ‘warning shots’ to force a British Navy destroyer to leave waters it claims in the Black Sea, but the U.K. rejected that, saying it was likely a ‘gunnery exercise’ that didn’t affect the ship’s planned voyage,” Bloomberg’s Jake Rudnitsky and Henry Meyer report. “The episode, which the Russian Defense Ministry said took place off Cape Fiolent, south of its Sevastopol naval base in Crimea, highlights the tensions in the area following Moscow’s 2014 annexation of the strategic peninsula from Ukraine.”
The U.S. took down Iran-linked news sites, alleging disinformation.
- “The Justice Department said 33 of the seized websites were used by the Iranian Islamic Radio and Television Union, which was singled out by the U.S. government last October for what officials described as efforts to spread disinformation and sow discord among American voters ahead of the 2020 presidential election,” the AP’s Isabel Debre and Eric Tucker report.
Black leaders in Rhode Island were divided on the defense by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) of his family’s ties to an exclusive beach club, amid questions about whether the club’s membership is all-White. “Whitehouse’s family has long belonged to Bailey’s Beach Club, which is formally known as the Spouting Rock Beach Association,” Eugene Scott and Felicia Sonmez report. “It’s unclear what the club’s membership breakdown is. Both Whitehouse and the club have declined to provide details.” Asked whether the club has any non-White members, Whitehouse said “I think the people who are running the place are still working on that, and I’m sorry it hasn’t happened yet.” But on Monday night, he said the club informed him it does, in fact, have “diversity of membership.”
“In an interview Tuesday, Gary Dantzler, the founder and executive director of Black Lives Matter Rhode Island, called Whitehouse’s membership in the club an insult to African Americans in the state who are working to dismantle systemic discrimination.”
The Loudoun County Public Schools board in Virginia cut short the public comment section of a school board meeting last night after a large crowd of unruly attendees protested critical race theory and a policy that would grant transgender students access to facilities and activities that match their gender identity, Hannah Natanson and Tom Jackman report. “Loudoun is pursuing the policy in accordance with a recently passed state law requiring school systems to revise their treatment of transgender students. Board members were slated to discuss that draft policy at Tuesday’s meeting. … Kraig Troxell, the spokesman for the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, said that after the board voted to end public comment and asked those in attendance to leave, ‘several attendees refused to leave,’ and one man was issued a summons for trespassing.”
Eliminating the filibuster, visualized
As the filibuster threatens to stall more of President Biden’s agenda, the momentum for changing or eliminating the procedural tool is growing among Senate Democrats. Follow our whip count to see where Democratic senators stand on changing or eliminating the filibuster.
Biden and first lady Jill Biden are attending the funeral of former senator John Warner. The president will deliver remarks honoring the former Virginia Republican who died of a heart ailment in Alexandria last month.
Harris will hold a listening session on voting rights with advocates today at noon. At 4 p.m., she will hold a roundtable marking Pride Month.
Stephen Colbert wondered why he wasn’t named in a report claiming that Trump asked the Justice Department for help stopping comedians who made fun of him:
And Pope Francis had a brief audience with your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man:
