Obama Ignores Violence in His Hometown

by Newt Gingrich: President Obama traveled to his hometown yesterday for a visit to the University of Chicago, where he once taught as a lecturer on constitutional law. The president used the opportunity to lecture once again--his soliloquy now directed at Republicans in the Senate, who are exercising their constitutional right not to consent to his choice for the Supreme Court.

Republicans, the President claimed, have decided that “placating our base is more important than upholding their constitutional and institutional roles in our democracy.”

The accusation of bad faith was typical of President Obama, and it was especially rich on this topic--coming from a president who has struggled to constrain his actions to the limits of the Constitution, and whose past judicial nominees have done the document no favors.

The President may wish that Republicans would rubber-stamp his choice for the Court on the basis of the nominee’s legal qualifications alone. But the Republican Senators--who themselves take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution”--see the addition of another liberal justice to a Court that has far exceeded its rightful powers as a step to which they cannot consent.

Since, as even the President’s own former advisor, David Axelrod, noted, the audience at the University of Chicago Law School is not the one the he must convince, it’s not clear why the President chose to focus on his Court fight--while failing to mention the crisis that’s occurring in that very city, the place that gave birth to his political career.

Already in the first three months of 2016, more than 700 people have been shot in Chicago. That’s an average of more than seven people every single day.

The rash of violence is reaching historic proportions.

As the Chicago Tribune reported:As the first quarter of 2016 nears an end, violence in Chicago has reached levels unseen in years, putting the city on course to top 500 homicides for only the second time since 2008.

As of 6 a.m. Wednesday, homicides totaled 135, a 71 percent jump over the 79 killings in the same year-earlier period, official Police Department statistics show. That represented the worst first quarter of a year since 136 homicides in 1999, according to the data.

Shootings have jumped by comparable numbers as well. As of Wednesday, at least 727 people had been shot in Chicago so far this year, a 73 percent rise from 422 a year earlier, according to a Tribune analysis of department data.

Worse yet, that jump follows two consecutive years in which shootings rose by double digits, the analysis found. Homicides also rose by about 12.5 percent last year over 2014.President Obama and the Left have no answer to this problem aside from more gun control in a city that already has among the strictest gun control laws in the country.

Yet at the very time in which Chicago is decaying into more violence, we have vivid proof that practical policies can save thousands of lives. If Chicago had focused on stopping violent crime the way New York did so successfully under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg, thousands of people in the city would still be alive. Indeed, contrast the danger in Chicago with this report from New York the same week:New York City saw a significant drop in major crimes in the first quarter of 2016 with the fewest murders and shootings in its recorded history, Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) announced during a Monday press conference.

“We are the safest big city in America. This quarter’s statistics prove it once again,” de Blasio said.

In the first three months of the year, New York City saw a 21 percent drop in murders compared with the same period last year, a statistic de Blasio called “extraordinary.” The city also saw a 14 percent decrease in shootings compared with those months in 2015.Perversely, much of the Left has spent the past several years attacking police departments and the very policies that have saved thousands of lives in New York and other cities. And President Obama, it must be said, has offered mostly encouraging words for these movements. In doing so, he does nothing to help the violence that is ravaging Chicago.

Next time the President returns home, hopefully he’ll find a few moments amid attacking Republicans to offer an answer for the bloodshed in the streets that doesn’t make the problem worse.
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Newt Gingrich is a former Georgia Congressman and Speaker of the U.S. House. He co-authored and was the chief architect of the "Contract with America" and a major leader in the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional elections. He is noted speaker and writer. The above commentary was shared via Gingrich Productions.

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