Democrats, the ruling party in NJ, need to stand up for police

By Rubashov
 

Police officers are wage-earning, blue-collar members of the working class.  They enforce the laws made by the Legislature, signed into law by the Governor, and upheld by the Judiciary.  The Legislature and the Governor are elected by the people.
 
Unfortunately, in New Jersey as elsewhere, wealthy elites who have the money to influence public policy have corrupted our elections.  Some elites, like Governors Corzine and Murphy, have used their vast wealth to get their hands directly on the levers of power.  The result of this corruption is summed up by that famous Princeton University Study into whether our nation was still of democracy.  It concluded… 

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

For more on this, we suggest you watch this short video from the reform group, Represent.Us:
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig

 The wealthy elites who dominate this country are not content with simply owning everything and getting their way… they want to tell YOU how to live too.  And  because they always get their way, their censoriousness results in new laws to promote the things they like and ban things they don’t like.  

This results in hypocrisies like Tammy Murphy’s advocacy for a so-called “green” energy plan that will raise costs for working people while allowing her comrades at Goldman-Sachs to pocket billions. 

 Like Phil Murphy’s quarantine of fellow Americans who live in states he feels have too many cases of COVID-19, while adopting a no-questions-asked “Sanctuary State” policy for people coming from foreign countries with not only high levels of COVID but high levels of TB, which kills 1.5 million people worldwide each year (including 200,000 children). 

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tuberculosis

In one of his most famous essays, writer George Will argued that political "overcriminalization" by a state legislature was responsible for the death of Eric Garner, a sidewalk merchant killed in a confrontation with police ordered to enforce a new law on sales tax scofflaws.  

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/394392/plague-overcriminalization-george-will

 Will raised the question of how many new laws are created by state legislatures and by Congress in the rush to be seen to be "doing something"?  Will's brilliant column is a must read for legislators thinking about proposing their next round of ideas that will end up being enforced by men with guns.  Will, a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist at The Washington Post, wrote his column before governors like Phil Murphy were sending police to break up church services and to arrest the owners of gyms and diners.  In his column, Will writes:
 
“Harvey Silverglate, a civil-liberties attorney, titled his 2009 book Three Felonies a Day to indicate how easily we can fall afoul of America’s metastasizing body of criminal laws. Professor Douglas Husak of Rutgers University says that approximately 70 percent of American adults have, usually unwittingly, committed a crime for which they could be imprisoned.
 
In his 2008 book, Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law, Husak says that more than half of the 3,000 federal crimes — itself a dismaying number — are found not in the Federal Criminal Code but in numerous other statutes. And, by one estimate, at least 300,000 federal regulations can be enforced by agencies wielding criminal punishments. Citing Husak, Professor Stephen L. Carter of the Yale Law School, like a hammer driving a nail head flush to a board, forcefully underscores the moral of this story:
 
Society needs laws; therefore it needs law enforcement. But ‘overcriminalization matters’ because ‘making an offense criminal also means that the police will go armed to enforce it.’ The job of the police ‘is to carry out the legislative will.’ But today’s political system takes ‘bizarre delight in creating new crimes’ for enforcement. And ‘every act of enforcement includes the possibility of violence.’
 
It’s unlikely that the New York Legislature, in creating the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes, imagined that anyone would die for violating it. But a wise legislator would give the matter some thought before creating a crime. Officials who fail to take into account the obvious fact that the laws they’re so eager to pass will be enforced at the point of a gun cannot fairly be described as public servants.”
 
Law enforcement actions will inevitably go wrong.  You can never mix men with guns – charged by the political class with preventing some form of human behavior – and humans under the influence or suffering from substance abuse or mental issues, without the possibility of something going wrong.  And every time some law enforcement interaction goes wrong, we can always count on the very same people who sent the police in the first place – the political class – to turn on them and “blame the police.”
 
The blue-collar police always get blamed – not the white-collar legislators or the governors who make the law and then send the police to enforce it.  The kick in the balls is that it’s some of those white-collar legislators who made the law who end up leading the protests against the police for enforcing the law they made.

In this moment of BLM/Antifa madness, many Democrat politicians are actively blaming the police who enforce the laws they made.  They are providing moral and legal support to those who target police officers and their families with acts up to and including terrorism.  Their friends in the economic elite are providing financial support to those who bear some measure of responsibility for incidents of  terror against the families of police officers, like the one below…

Police officers come in all races, creeds, and genders.  It is the best job available to folks of their class in a job market that has grown increasingly thinner (courtesy of the politicians and their paymasters).  If the politicians could find a way to outsource the work, they would... and maybe, they will, someday.  But for now, our police are our neighbors, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, moms and dads.  For now, they are just ordinary members of our communities called upon to do some very important and often unpleasant work.  Blue-collar work at blue-collar pay. 
 
How many of Phil Murphy's One-Percenter neighbors would perform CPR on a homeless man if he needed it?  A cop will. 

"Every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered…History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

George Orwell
(Eric Arthur Blair)

Blue what? The only NJ Dem legislator elected to Congress was endorsed by the NRA!

There’s a lot to be said for not having a record. 

For a start, you can lie about who you are and what you will do when you get elected.  You can even target your lies to different audiences – like pretending you have a war record and appealing to suburban voters with your anti-tax broadcast advertising, while using your grassroots to find and target liberals with a message especially for them.  That’s how the Democrats did it. 

Republicans… they did it ass backwards.  They invested millions to tell their grassroots to go to hell and then broadcast an explicitly liberal message to those cultural leftists who hate the word “Republican” the most.  And they did it in the midst of the most divisive national election since 2010 – on par with 1994.  They invested even more millions in turning out the very people who loath them – all the while doing their utmost to convince their base that they think of them the same way they think of dog excrement.  See, in this way you lose everybody! 

New Jersey Republicans desperately needed a unified message to take to war in 2018.  After Donald Trump and the GOP leadership in Congress screwed them by passing a tax package that arguably raised property taxes in the state with the worst property tax problem in the nation – somebody should have got everyone in a room to figure out a message.  Hey, it’s a small state so if you don’t want to come off like a cacophony, you’d better all be singing the same tune.

Instead, half argued that screwing with the state’s property tax deduction was a net positive, half said it was a net negative – and the Democrats, they just loved it!  For once, they got to be the party defending the beleaguered property taxpayers of New Jersey.  What passes for the media in New Jersey backed them up on it.  And more importantly, so did the instincts of the average property taxpayer.  Donald Trump or no Donald Trump, when it comes to trusting the promises politicians make about property taxes, they don’t.  Period.  Somebody should have remembered that.

After handing the property tax issue to the Democrats – the issue that has consistently tested as the top concern of New Jersey voters for at least the last decade – it is amazing the NJGOP did as well as it did on November 6th.  A large part of the electorate already hated Donald Trump (and therefore, the Republican brand) and wanted to show it – but by miscalculation, the remainder were granted permission to hate the GOP too… over property taxes!  Gagged and gagged again.

But it wouldn’t have worked so well if the Democrats hadn’t been such clean slates.  Just think of it.  All those Democrats in the Legislature with all those perfect liberal voting records… and the only guy who is acceptable to the electorate to move up and go to Congress is the state’s most conservative Democrat legislator… the one who is endorsed by the NRA.  The one who voted against same-sex marriage.  Heck, Jeff Van Drew is more Pro-Life than many Republicans and has opposed both RGGI and increasing the minimum wage!  But he moved up, and all the rest stayed behind. 

Meanwhile, DC residents Andy Kim and Tom Malinowski simply move into the state, take out six month leases on rental properties, run and win.  And the silly fools who spent years as Democrat committee members, in local governments, running for Freeholder and then for Assembly… they just suck ass.  You can’t get elected because your liberal records won’t let you.

Where did Mikie Sherrill come from?  The “Navy pilot – Prosecutor – Mom” fell out of the sky and landed in Congress.  In the new politics of congressional elections, she’s one of the Houyhnhnm.  Back in the trenches, the time-serving yahoos can only snort and envy her advancement. 

Yesterday, Rutgers put out a new poll showing that – once again – taxes top the state’s issues grid (with a sizeable number volunteering “property” taxes as their big concern).  The Eagleton poll noted that people are generally happy with the state’s economy and, as it is part of a generally buoyant national economy, that shouldn’t surprise anyone, but it does appear Democrat Governor Murphy is taking more credit than the state Republican leaders.  One “research professor” drew attention to “a new phenomenon” of voters not having quite formed an opinion of Phil Murphy, after nearly a year in office.  It’s like they don’t know him and it’s taking some time. (Maybe they will now… after yesterday’s snow job?)

A phenomenon is it?  Why is anyone surprised, given the state of political news coverage in New Jersey?  Just ask anyone on press row… oh, that’s right, it’s not there anymore.  If it’s a national election like we just had, the coverage will be driven by national outlets.  If not… good luck.  And that is something our campaign gurus are going to need to consider when planning what used to be called “earned media” campaigns. 

Meanwhile, back at madness central, a couple of juvenile delinquent Democrat Assemblywomen invited “pro-death penalty for American military members” activist Jane Fonda to place a feather in her patouee and lead a conga line from the Speaker’s office to the Governor’s den.  Not a word yet from Navy pilot Mikie Sherrill about the appropriateness of Fonda’s appearance – or from Andy Kim or Tom Malinowski, for that matter.  But hey Assemblywomen, keep it up.  If that’s the fashion, keep it up and you’ll soon find yourself in… Congress?  NOT!