THE CRIME BILL FALLACY.There is yet one more thing to be said about that egregious Tom Edsall column on Saturday: His key example of the destruction of the Democratic Party by it's left-wing interest groups -- the 1994 crime bill -- is entirely false.
Edsall says the bill �sought to burnish the party�s justice credentials by increasing the number of felonies subject to the death penalty,� but instead, �amendments added to win support from the left � most visibly, $40 million for midnight basketball leagues � caught fire on conservative talk radio, spread to the establishment media, and soon became a liability.�
In fact, as the crime bill wound through the Senate and then the House, conservative Republicans as well as Democrats agreed that initiatives to prevent crime � largely by ensuring that adolescents had activities to occupy their time � were at least as central to actually reducing street crime as increasing the number of felonies subject to the federal death penalty. This idea didn't come from the wacky left, but from police officers, who were complaining that they were being put in the position of social workers and that kids with nothing to do and nowhere to go sometimes break the law. ("Let's go get sushi and not pay.")
