The answer is lots of bad stuff and mischief on all fronts. On “civil rights” alone, the Biden DOJ will reverse course on race-based preferences, backing discrimination against Whites and Asians by colleges, employers, etc. And it will back attacks on religious liberty, for example in the context of coronvirus restrictions on worship (if they remain in effect) and in cases where LGBT agenda items clash with religious freedom.
The biggest issue, however, is likely to be policing. We should expect the Biden Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to conduct more investigations of police departments, bring more civil rights actions against officers, and force departments into more consent decrees that enable the federal government to control major aspects of local policing.
We should expect this, first, because “reimagining policing” became the number one item of substance for the Democratic base this year. The base will demand that the DOJ make this a top priority next year. Biden won’t resist. He probably isn’t even inclined to.
Second, lethal police shootings of Black men — the fuel for the base’s attacks on the police — will continue. With as many encounters as police officers have every day with Black thugs and career criminals, it’s impossible not to have lethal shootings, including a few that may not be justified. If anything the BLM movement has emboldened thugs and criminals to act aggressively against the police, thereby making it likely that the number of police shootings will increase.
Thus, the pressure on the DOJ to go after police departments and officers isn’t going away. It might even intensify.
That’s the bad news. The good news, if you want to look at it that way, is that attacking police departments and officers is a political loser for Democrats. Barack Obama recognized this obvious reality when he criticized Democrats for talking about “defunding” the police.”
It’s important to note, as Andy McCarthy does, that Obama was criticizing only the packaging of the Democrats’ anti-police campaign. His quarrel was with the slogan, not the substance. It was, in McCarthy’s words, “the classic Alinskyite critique of undisciplined radicals who set back The Cause by using unhinged language in the service of what Saul Alinksy himself described as ‘pointless, sure-loser confrontations.’”
The thing to remember is that the more disciplined radicals in the Obama administration took on local policing with oppressive consent decrees and other measures of that nature. And this was before BLM hit its stride. We can expect — indeed, be nearly certain — that the Biden administration will return to this course and up the ante.
Doing so will mean passive policing of the kind that took hold in Baltimore. It will mean many police officer resignations, especially in metropolitan areas, on top of the ones that are already undermining law enforcement.
The result will be further spikes in violent crime, as happened in Baltimore and is happening in Minneapolis. And the result of that will be growing discontent with Democrats for undermining public safety.
Barack Obama has it wrong. It’s not the “defund” slogan that hurt the Democrats. It’s the recognition that less policing means less public safety. No amount of packaging or spin is likely to protect Democrats from the political fallout of unsafe streets attributable to less policing.
Is it a coincidence that, from the time Richard Nixon made law and order a key issue until the time Bill Clinton got Democrats (including Joe Biden) on the right side of that issue, Republicans won five of six presidential elections? I don’t think so.
Neither did Clinton.
