I’m in a great mood as I write this, having just watched the Phillies methodically crush the Pittsburgh Pirates at Citizens Bank Park on Saturday night. This win, and the consistent way they have been winning, make me believe they are a near-lock to be a playoff team this year. A team no one wants to play in the playoffs.
And after the events of the past week, I feel even better about the odds of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner being impeached for his blatant failure to enforce our laws. He hasn’t helped his case by refusing to comply with a subpoena from the bipartisan Select Committee in Harrisburg for basic documents that would allow it to actually see what he is doing in office.
On my weekly Facebook show entitled “Krasnerland,” which can be found at www.Facebook.com/1210WPHT, state Representative Martina White of Northeast Philadelphia told me how Krasner’s outright rejection of the subpoena had enraged Republicans and dramatically increased the odds of impeachment.
After talking with her, I believe Krasner’s strategy will be to stonewall the investigation and subdue the Republicans behind it, bully and intimidate them the way he has most political and media sources in Philadelphia.
Sorry, Larry. You’re out of luck. It won’t work this time.
Krasner is going to be impeached. White and I discussed the metric that will be used to prove he is not fulfilling his oath of office. We centered on his public statements that he will not prosecute serious charges against people illegally carrying a gun, and his directives not to seriously prosecute repeat shoplifting offenders unless they shoplift more than $1,000 in a single incident.
One challenge facing the Select Committee is the difficulty of distinguishing the violation of the oath of office from “prosecutorial discretion.”
In other words, Krasner’s defense boils down to, “How do you know my progressive policies are the problem? Maybe I just stink at my job?”
Writing for FoxNews.com, Scott A. Coffina, who just completed a five-year term as the county prosecutor for Burlington County, said “Discretion should be exercised at the macro level by establishing enforcement priorities to ensure public safety, not as a hollow justification for the wholesale abdication of the responsibility to enforce a law with which that prosecutor disagrees. To illustrate, when gun violence spikes, effective prosecutors will exercise their discretion to prioritize gun crime prosecutions, which might result in de-emphasizing prosecutions of other, nonviolent crimes, but not ignoring them [and certainly not announcing you will ignore them].”
A good measure of what Krasner is doing is to compare him to Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer. Stollsteimer hung up on me during the first call on the air we had after he took office. Since then, even though he did receive some Soros funding, I’ve admired what he has done in many cases and particularly how he and his team have driven down violent crime in the city of Chester by using an innovative carrot and stick approach that targets those who are the most likely to shoot someone or be shot by someone.
In other words, Stollsteimer might sometimes use his discretion in ways I don’t like, but he is fighting crime and enforcing the laws that he swore to enforce. Krasner is only really prosecuting police officers and clearly still sees himself as a defense attorney with power.
So, I think in the next few weeks you will see a dozen or more survivors of murdered Philadelphia crime victims testify against Krasner along with various legal experts who will outline how he is violating his oath of office. The Select Committee will recommend impeachment and he will be impeached.
A representative told me that after impeachment, a trial would start in the Pennsylvania Senate, and Republicans would need five Democratic senators to vote with them to ouster Krasner. This part won’t be easy, but several Democratic senators are in moderate districts.
This is doable, but — like the Phillies — let’s don’t look past the next game.
