Tag Archives: House Judiciary Committee

Return of the Broken Gavel

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Well, I didn’t expect to be recycling this cheeseball graphic so soon, but here we are with House leadership violating one of the fundamental rules of running a legislative body. Last time it was letting the minority Republicans win something for the first time in (per Rep. Mark Higley) 18 years. This time it’s depending on Republican votes to pass a major bill because a solid majority of Democrats wanted to change it.

Whatever the merits of the bill in question, this is another case of leadership malpractice. If you can’t convince your members to go your way, then run to the front of the pack and at least pretend you’re leading.

The bill, S.208, passed the Senate as a ban on police personnel — local, state, federal — wearing masks or otherwise concealing their identities, and requiring the wearing of visible identification. The House Judiciary Committee removed federal police from the bill because a court decision struck down a similar California law, and Judiciary felt that S.208 would suffer the same fate.

But when the bill went to the full House, it became clear that most Democrats preferred the Senate version. House leadership repeatedly postponed a floor vote as it sought a way forward for the House Judiciary version. Apparently they gave up, because the vote finally happened on Wednesday. A proposed amendment to restore the Senate version came before the House, and more than two-thirds of voting Democrats bucked leadership and voted for the amendment.

Now, that’s embarrassing.

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Welcome To Another Performance of Retail Theft Kabuki Theater

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Last Friday’s meeting of the House Judiciary Committee was, to the casual observer, devoted to beating the drum for a crackdown on retail theft, the crime formerly known as shoplifting. (Does “retail theft” sound less, I don’t know, recreational than shoplifting? Probably.)

Anyway. There’s precious little evidence to support claims that retail theft is on the rise. The main propagator of this assertion is the National Retail Federation, a lobbying group for the industry that’s been making it easier and easier to steal stuff by cutting staff and instituting self-checkout. The NRF spent years flogging a bogus study that allegedly showed a tsunami of “organized retail crime,” only to retract it last month. Actual crime statistics indicate that “organized” theft accounts for a small fraction of shoplifting. And outside of a handful of major cities, there’s no evidence that retail theft is on the rise at all.

So now the tactics have shifted. We hear much less talk about rampant crime in our malls and downtowns, and more about the “perception” of a problem. People “feel” as though shoplifting is a crisis. Therefore, the argument goes, we must treat it like a crisis.

As a result, House Judiciary is considering an array of crime bills, and it began a scheduled series of hearings on Friday. But if you watched closely, you could detect a bit of nudge-nudge, wink-wink going on. The hearing seemed designed to meet the perception of disorder with the counter-perception of a crackdown than with an actual “tough on crime” offensive.

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