U.S. Justice Dept weighs stripping federal funds from cities allowing 'anarchy' | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Justice Dept weighs stripping federal funds from cities allowing 'anarchy'

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27 pointspera41 comments

I live in Manhattan. I don't know what anarchy they are talking about. It is calm, peaceful, and beautiful here right now. I have not seen, nor heard, a protest since June or July? I've biked all around Manhattan and the only distressing thing I've seen is the closed storefronts and "for lease" signs plaguing city blocks. Mayor de Blasio seems intent on ruining the local economy with petty rules and restrictions.

They are making up their own reality. The people under their sphere of influence are absolutely positive NYC/PDX etc are burning to the ground.

My grandmother called me in a panic the other day because she thought rioters burned down my neighborhood in Chicago. An hour long conversation and I still couldn’t grasp why she thought that.

That’s the type of question I get most often. “What is the rioting like?” Well I don’t know because there hasn’t been any. Everything is peaceful and calm. People are walking around with masks and socially distancing themselves while they lounge in the park. It’s total anarchy.

Probably because you live in the wealthiest part. Murders are up 140% in NYC. You didn’t read the actual Washington report.

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

I did. Murders are up 50% but overall crime is flat, including overall violent crime. The percentage is misleading, too, because the raw numbers are still quite low. NYC doesn’t even crack the top 70 deadliest cities in the US.

https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/murder-map-deadliest-u-s-ci...

https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/public_safety/crime-sele...

Based on the numbers, NYC probably isn’t even in the top 200 of deadliest cities. At some point you have to switch to “safest cities” instead.

Maybe the US DoJ should defund St Louis? Or maybe not because that would be idiotic and counter intuitive.

Your first source uses 2018 data.

The second is from 2017 data.

Try again.

The cities they are targeting probably send a disproportionate amount of tax money to the federal government. I really wish the mayors of these cities, and the governors of these states would start to talk about this imbalance.

Define disproportionate. Is it not proportionate to the number of citizens?

No. Some state take in billions more in federal tax dollars then they send in with states like Alabama and Kentucky often at the top of the list. Without California and New York floating most red states they'd be sunk.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-s...

This is why when a red state chooses to lower taxes or otherwise increase their reliance on federal help I laugh at the hypocrisy of the bootstraps party and wonder why my federal taxes, in a blue state without federal support, should go to such irresponsible people.

The suggestion is that these cities are potentially paying more money to the federal government than they get back in federal aid. The population is irrelevant.

Urban areas have higher per capita income, and taxes are progressive, so out of proportion to the number of citizens is a possible meaning.

Congress controls the purse, not the President and his increasingly political departments. If they want to change the law, they should vote on a bill first.

It seems that the rules and common law interpretations that we are used to no longer apply to the degree that we imagined.

> Congress controls the purse, not the President

Congress authorizes spending but the executive actually does it and, in practice, can fail to do it selectively. If not statutorily authorized, this can be illegal, but the fact that it's illegal doesn't mean a whole lot until someone uses that fact to force it to be undone, which can take quite a long time.

> If they want to change the law, they should vote on a bill first.

What if they just want to arbitrarily exercise power and don’t give a flip about the content of the law, what should they do then?

I love how anarchists, who are a tiny sliver of the population which has never had any significant political power, are now scapegoats for all the problems created by the very same powerful right wing plutocrats trying to pin it all on anarchists. And it’s crystal clear that they don’t even know what anarchism is. Lovely.

I wish I could go back in time to when I didn't need to tense up before opening up the news each day.

How does this policy help the country? It's just so blatantly designed to hurt people.

The whole point seems to be to rile up Trump's base at the cost of people who are just trying to go about their lives during a pandemic.

> I wish I could go back in time to when I didn't need to tense up before opening up the news each day.

This really hits home. These four years have been such a depressing time for just reading the news. Every day it seems the US is edging closer and closer to.... I don't even know what. With half the country happily marching to the drumbeats. It's amazing just how fragile our systems were.

I've been wondering if it's just mentally more healthy to go the ignorance is bliss route. I know so many people who don't even register these kinds of events, and they seem happier.

> I didn't need to tense up before opening up the news

If you frighten people enough they will vote for anything that resembles safety. The first part is accomplished, wouldn't you say?

Don't trust the news. Watch documentaries about mainstream news (Manufacturing Consent is my personal fav) and you will see that reality is not what they are peddling--it is influence.

Remember when the media didn’t lie? Yeah, that was nice.

No? Yellow journalism has been a thing since the newspaper became a thing.

> Remember when the media didn’t lie?

No, but I'm old enough to remember when all the major media told approximately the same lies so that they were part of the shared, accepted “truth”, which is probably what you are thinking of.

Isn’t congress supposed to write laws, not the executive branch?

The Trump admin has such a gross third world dictatorial bent

I would like to hear the arguments of anyone who thinks this is not both illegal and fascistic

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't see how it is illegal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/nyregion/sanctuary-cities...

Another case that may apply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Dole

It may be illegal, but it's not really clear, it seems like it would need to be decided in court.

Note that that sanctuary city cases was the exception. 3 other federal circuit courts ruled the other way, and so far the Supreme Court has refused to vote, so as it stands, the government can withhold funds from NY but not California or Oregon or Washington.

Go figure why the GOP wishes to add another SCoutUS judge with 1.5 months to the election, unlike precedent set in 2016 by McConnell's senate along with vocal support from Senator Graham.

It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for political battle. That's against the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do this. Commenting occasionally on political threads while generally using the site as intended is fine, but using it primarily for politics is not fine, because those things will take over the site by default if we allow it, and that's not HN's mandate. If you would please review the rules and use the site as intended, we'd appreciate it.

(On the other hand, I didn't see your account attacking fellow users, calling names, and so on—that's definitely good.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

More explanation about how we moderate this:

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I wouldn't argue that it's not "fascistic", except in the sense of semantic gamesmanship, but it wouldn't surprise me to discover that it's not illegal. The law is like a billion lines of Javascript, written by high school students, over decades, without even a single unit test, with the server running continuously.

"Legal" consists entirely of the opinions of lawyers, who are literally trained in law school to see both sides of every problem and construct a defense either way. I suspect the DoJ would have no problem constructing a brief that it's legal.

Ultimately the decision rests entirely with more lawyers on the court, and if they happen to be predisposed, there is no higher power to tell them otherwise. Even a flagrant, direct contradiction of the text is completely irrelevant.

I'm not a lawyer so I don't know how that applies in this case. I just have little doubt that it already has been.

> The law is like a billion lines of Javascript

Best explanation--it's a huge collection of patches. There are key moments that revisit the spirit or unintended consequences but it's a largest legacy codebase that grows faster than the tech debt can be cleaned up.

If you label a rival political other as an enemy of the state, especially when groups that support the state are known be more violent and deadly to Americans (police/white nationalists), that is inherently fascistic.

A fascist government will not announce it is but rather that antifascists are enemies of the state. This has already happened and is simply ramping up. It will lead to stochastic terror and more bloodshed.

Since Barr doesn't seem to be acquainted with the law, or the Constitution he's not encumbered with such limitations.

His law degree from George Washington University, being a member of the bar, and his having worked for the Washington, D.C., law firm Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge probably refutes your assertion. [1]

1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-P-Barr

There appears to be some controversy at GWU regarding how much that stamp of approval should matter.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2020/06/26/scathing-...

Because I didn't see a link to it in the article, a brief explaining why the decision was made: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-identifies...

If you govern a people and willfully allow them to become endangered through, eg. defunding the police, permitting lawless zones throughout your jurisdiction, and so on, and the end result is innocent lives under your power are harmed or destroyed, then you should be held accountable.

Addendum: Minneapolis should also be considered, as their local government took similar actions which resulted in similar - predictable - results: https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2020/09/16/minneapo...

And they ask "where are the police?" after defunding the police.

The police have not been defunded in either Minneapolis or NYC. They have decided—while fully funded—to stop doing their jobs to punish the cities that tried to hold them accountable for their abuses.

Correction:

And they ask "where are the police?" after unanimously deciding to defund (rather, abolish) the police.

So an entire police force must be abolished because of the alleged abuses of a few?

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