Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) sees urban crime as dangerous to President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects as homicide and theft continue to plague America’s largest cities.
House Republicans have spent months highlighting the crisis at the southern border. Stubbornly low approval ratings on the economy have also weighed down the president.
But Jordan, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has continued to highlight a third issue, one that dogged Democrats for much of the last election cycle: public safety.
The panel has held a series of hearings on the “victims of violent crime.” On Friday, Jordan brought lawmakers to Philadelphia to speak with the families of slain officers who blamed the city’s progressive district attorney for their deaths.
The focus is a bit of an aberration for House Republicans. That is, in part, because homicides, which peaked during the pandemic, have begun to decline nationwide. Republicans also underperformed in the midterm elections despite the political headwinds favoring them on the issue.
Yet Jordan sees a melding of issues, which he dubbed the “big four,” as hobbling Democrats, and crime is one of them.
“I think it’s still a big issue,” he told the Washington Examiner in an interview ahead of his hearing on Friday.
“We went from a secure border to no border. We went from safe streets to record crime. We went from $2 gas to $4 gas, and we went from stable pricing to record inflation,” he said. “So, those four things are on the minds of Americans.”
Jordan called the focus on law and order a matter of “good public policy.” He and his Republican colleagues spent the better part of three hours arguing that criminal leniency, embraced and then abandoned by Democrats after the death of George Floyd, was to blame for the spike in violence.
But Jordan acknowledged that crime also has electoral consequences, and he predicted that Biden will be tied to it. Fifty-eight percent of the public believes crime should be a top priority for Washington, according to Pew Research, up from 47% when Biden assumed office.
“I think Americans are fed up with everything they see in the Biden administration,” Jordan said.
Democrats have attempted to neutralize that line of attack. Although the killing of Floyd ushered in conversations about police brutality and even calls to defund the police, the pandemic-era rise in crime forced Democrats to tack right.
They highlight dollars allocated by the American Rescue Plan that localities have used to staff up their police departments, while Biden has leaned into law and order messaging as he runs for a second term.
On Thursday, he delivered a rebuke of the vandalism and harassment consuming anti-Israel college protests.
Jordan dismissed the speech, which came after a week of silence from the president, as “all of four minutes” and “pretty late,” and he called for the administration to revoke the visas of foreign students who engaged in unlawful activity as part of the protests.
The demand, which he made in a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, demonstrates the ways crime continues to be a red-meat issue for Republicans.
But it also shows how it’s become subordinated to, or at least interwoven with, concerns over immigration. The party frequently cites drug trafficking and instances in which Americans were killed by illegal immigrants.
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“I do think that bundled up into bigger issues like border security are crime policy,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), a border state Republican who leads the Judiciary subcommittee focused on crime, said.
“Crime is kind of nested into a bigger picture,” he added.
