JOHN PODHORETZ: Alvin Bragg’s psychotic policies are a gift to the GOP.
Indeed, the growing GOP advantage on criminal-justice issues was one of the three pillars of its spectacular rise over the three decades following the 1964 election (the others being the economy and foreign policy), in which LBJ won 61 percent of the vote while Democrats emerged with a 155-member majority in the House and 69 of the Senate’s 100 seats.
What Alvin Bragg has done here must be seen in conjunction with the “Defund the police” and “decarceration” activists who have dominated the Democratic Party’s discourse on criminal justice for the past two years.
Bragg’s memo is the most radical manifestation of the “progressive prosecutor” movement — the systematic effort on the left to elect activists for social justice rather than defenders of the right of ordinary citizens to live unmolested by crime.
Other such prosecutors — Chesa Boudin, now facing a recall election in San Francisco, and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia — laid the groundwork. But Bragg is the DA in the most important borough in the most important city in the United States, and if he has his way, the 1974 movie “Death Wish” will soon seem like today’s newscast rather than a piquant period piece.
And this is why he is such a gift to the GOP. Every Republican candidate at every level for every office in the United States can and will cite Bragg’s memo as a vanguard document of the Democratic Party.
“Today, it’s Manhattan,” they’ll say. “Tomorrow, it’s Springfield.” The psychotic ideas unfolding in the Big Apple now will be dominating the Biden Justice Department in short order, they’ll say.
As Tom Cotton wrote last month: Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.