As a new month starts, I’m feeling a little frustrated over what I perceive as the Trump administration’s taking their foot off the pedal in a few areas. With the mid-terms only 5 months away, I’m hoping that they are not forgetting one of the basic principles of behavior modification: you get more of what you reward, and less of what you punish.
Here at home, I’d love to see us enforce some more consequences on anti-ICE rioters, and on sanctuary city politicians.
The “protestors” in New Jersey have had a federal facility under siege for more than a week now. What they’re doing is blatantly illegal, as everyone can see from countless hours of videos. The feds should have responded decisively the first or second night.
Broadcast several warnings that the mob action is illegal and anybody who stays there is subject to arrest immediately. Then respond with legal but overwhelming force: flood the area with officers and troops – from ICE, Border Patrol, the National Guard, etc. Use pepper spray, tasers, bean-bag shotgun loads and rubber bullets on the most violent among them, and start making mass arrests.
While that’s going on, bring in a fleet of busses capable of holding hundreds of rioters, and start carrying them immediately to the closest detention centers under the control of the federal government.
Since local leftist government won’t cooperate, don’t allow them any role. Take the lawbreakers to federal sites, charge them with federal crimes, and come down on them the way the left did on the non-violent protestors among the January 6ers: maximum charges, maximum bail, and make an example out of them.
That all sounds harsh to many people, I’m sure. But it would all be done following the letter of the law, and would be proportionate to the amount of widespread law breaking that has been going on for five years. And that kind of firm response would not have to be repeated over and over again, because once all but the dumbest of the rioters saw that they would face real consequences for their actions, they’d tuck tail and leave. Maybe some of them would even start devoting their time to something worthwhile.
Sure, there would still be a hard-core, violent leftist and anarchist remnant that would fight on for a while…until they were all behind bars together. As with most criminal behavior, a very small number of people commit most of the crimes, and those people belong in jail for a long time. And that’s where they’d be, in fairly short order.
While that direct law enforcement action would be a great start, I don’t know why we also aren’t hammering sanctuary cities and states with every legal and financial lever at our disposal. The one consistent fact about pretty much all big blue cities is that they are mini-welfare states, completely unable to support themselves without a predictable, regular firehose of taxpayer cash to sustain their dysfunctional behaviors and programs.
So why not cut that cash flow to a minimum? Use the same principle the feds used to force compliance with the mostly unpopular 55 mph speed limit in the 1970s. In that case, the feds used the power of money to force the states to change their ways, even though the new rules weren’t laws, and had no constitutional or legislative force behind them. If a state didn’t agree to drop their speed limit, the feds cut off their federal transportation funds.
In this case, sanctuary cities are defying federal laws in a variety of ways. They forbid ICE or other federal law enforcement from using any city or state property as staging grounds for law enforcement action. They don’t honor ICE detainers for illegals who have committed additional and often violent crimes. They spend billions of taxpayer dollars giving illegals welfare payments (cash, SNAP, housing, etc.), and billions more on fraud that they pretend not to notice.
Many of those actions have got to be illegal; if they don’t constitute insurrection, I’m not sure how. So why not just cut off those funds? Tell the states whose welfare spending is suspiciously high – which would be the usual blue suspects – that if they are giving any Medicaid money or food stamps to illegals, we’re cutting off all Medicaid and SNAP funding to their state until they can show us the books and account for where that money is going.
Or we could be nicer at first, withholding only the proportion of funds that a state is lawlessly giving to illegals, or losing to fraud. If 25% of CA’s $100 billion yearly Medicaid spending goes to illegals and 10% to fraudulent “hospice care” store fronts and the like (the numbers are hypothetical, and rounded for clarity), then the feds could send $35 billion less to California.
Let Ken-Doll Newsom try to take those benefits away from American citizens and give them to illegals and fraudsters. I’m seriously doubting whether any reality can hit blue state voters enough to wake them up, but if anything can, it might be that.
In foreign policy, I’m similarly frustrated with the slow progress in Iran. Now I might be wildly wrong about this point, since I’ve never worn the uniform and have no military experience.
But I’ve followed the news well enough to recognize that we’ve got the best military in the world, and that Iran wasn’t close. And that was before we destroyed their air force, any conventional navy vessels bigger than a “fast boat” with a machine gun on it, and the vast majority of whatever missile capability they had.
So if the reporting is to be believed, they might have handful of shore-based missiles, and some small drones (which it seems everybody has now), along with the ability to lay a small number of mines in the gulf. I can’t believe that we couldn’t counter those pretty easily. Especially since it seems like the Iranians don’t have the ability to inflict many (if any?) casualties on us, given the imbalance in military power.
Why wouldn’t we just announce that starting tomorrow, we’re going to be escorting everybody but Iranian-aiding oil tankers and other traffic into and out of the Persian Gulf, and that any Iranian fast boats, drones or missiles will be met with overwhelming force, instantly. Get our own drones, surveillance planes and satellites in action, and dare the Iranians to try to come out and stop us.
Our drones, planes and shipboard fire should be able to take down their drones, and our air and naval forces should be able to spot any fast boats leaving Iranian bases and blow them to pieces immediately. The same should go for missiles, though I could be wrong, given the very short distances a missile would have to travel to hit a target in the Strait.
If the above assumptions are correct – and again, I’m no expert and have no inside knowledge – why not escort a heavily defended, small flotilla of oil tankers through the strait. The IRGC would have to make some effort to attack them or else lose all credibility, but we should be able to quickly destroy those, along with the locations from which they were launched.
The best-case scenario would be that the IRGC would hit only a few or no targets, at the cost of much of their dwindling remaining military personnel and resources. The worst-case would be that they hit or sink an oil tanker, or maybe two. With our ships in the area we could quickly rescue sailors from a sinking ship and likely prevent the loss of life. Considering the amount of money we’re already spending, we could probably insure and/or pay for the cost of a handful of lost tankers pretty easily.
If we were to escort a flotilla of ships through the strait each day for a week, the IRGC would lose more attackers that they can’t replace each day. (Meanwhile, between the Israelis and us, I’m assuming that we have a bunch of pre-selected IRGC targets all ready to go, and we’d be drone- and missile-striking those 24/7, as the opportunities arise.) Each day they’d be able to send fewer boats or drones, to less and less effect.
I can’t believe that it would take more than a week or two to re-open the Strait to 75% or more of what the pre-war traffic was, which would add to the pressure on the IRGC, and push down oil and gasoline prices precipitously.
Fast, decisive action like that would address all three of the most legitimate political criticisms Trump is facing: we’re spending a lot to maintain our forces in theatre; we’re ceding more leverage to the very weak IRGC because of our midterm calendar; and the stalemate has increased gas prices and thus inflation.
It seems like the only thing the IRGC has going for them is time, and they only have that if we allow them to slow-walk talks and string us along. And we don’t have to do that, right?
Both here and in Iran, we’ve been rewarding bad actors, so we’ve been getting more bad behavior. Why not focus on the “FO,” and see if that doesn’t greatly decrease the “FA?”
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Martin Simpson 