A Clownshow Comes to the City

House Judiciary Republicans' Manhattan show features a Wisconsin Tiffany

This week the American political freak show sent a clown car to town.

Yes, darlings, right into Manhattan!

The Republican Congressmen who run the House Judiciary Committee plotted a trolling stunt: Deliver Florida Man Matt Gaetz and Ohio’s Gym Jordan and their lesser known colleagues up the Northeast Liberal Corridor into New York City. Spend a few hours at the Javits Center hauling in some local crime victims for a “field hearing.” Let the members talk on right wing media about their opposition to crime.

DO not, by any means, address the real crime wave washing over America, a wave that is measurably worse in Red States - the rampant murder, maiming and mayhem enabled by their party’s opposition to the most basic levels of gun control.

Nope: Urban crime. New York City crime.

Code that needs no de-cryption.

They titled their field hearing “Victims of Violent Crime in Manhattan.

The truth is that there has been an uptick in crime in New York. The city was brought to its knees by the pandemic and it has yet to recover. Homelessness rose and the moneyed fled. Now, vast commercial buildings in Midtown lie empty or underused. Offices gather dust and mice. Businesses that once served the former office-goers who work from home have either gone under or are struggling to survive.

A commercial real estate apocalypse probably looms in the city. But no one wants to put a name to that, even speak of it, least of all Republicans, for fear of sparking a panic.

Instead of addressing these serious issues, the clown show wheeled into town on a trolling mission. Republicans are unhappy that the city’s district attorney, Alvin Bragg, finally charged their party’s lawless leader with some felonies. Thirty-four, to be exact, related to hush money he paid to a porn star to keep quiet until he got the Evangelicals to decide he was Jesus.

The committee even brought its own Tiffany, to town, Wisconsin Rep. Tom Tiffany, no relation to the jewelry store after which Donald Trump named one of his “classy” daughters. Cheese State Tiffany hails from a far North Woods congressional district bordering Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Lake Superior and Minnesota. He is bestpectacled, low-key, like a high school principal. Perhaps because he is bland and not a recognizable political outrage coin op machine like Committee Chairman Gym Jordan of Ohio, or Gaetz, he was dispatched to advertise the hearing to conservative media rounds.

In an appearance on Fox with Maria Bartiromo, Mr. Tiffany said he was in New York on behalf of the people of Wisconsin, who are now afraid to come see Lion King and the 9/11 Memorial.

“I hear from people regularly out here in Wisconsin. They’re like, ‘I don’t know if I want to go to New York City right now because it’s not safe.’ So Alvin Bragg can talk about how New York City is safe, but that’s clearly not the message the American people nor the people from New York City are hearing.”

But is Wisconsin any safer? Mr. Tiffany’s far North Woods district averaged 67 gun suicides per year - about 9 per 100,000 — far more per capita than New York City area, where gun suicides average about 1-2 per 100,000, according to research compiled by Everytown for Gun Safety. Wisconsin’s largest city, Milwaukee, saw a record number of opioid deaths in 2021. 

There was a real crime wave in the city last year, including some high profile murders involving mentally ill people in the subways. That was brought to heel by February 2023, in part thanks to NYPD putting cops on all subway platforms.

The Committee Republicans did accomplish another entirely political goal, in federal court, getting up into Prosecutor Alvin Bragg’s business. They found a Trump-appointed judge to rubber stamp their claim that a former prosecutor’s book on the long Trump hush money investigation possibly taints the underlying case against their Dear Leader.

While the Judiciary committee convened in New York and played the media, three innocent Americans who were lost or confused and had wandered to the wrong address, or opened the wrong car door, were killed by trigger happy gun-owners. These tragedies are both insane and entirely predictable. Some of the killers might even be found not legally liable under Red state “stand your ground” gun laws, which allow people to shoot visitors at their front doors.

The real aim of the phony New York Judiciary Committee hearing was an attempt to divert attention from Trumpy felony charges and, coincidentally, from the very real plague of gun violence in America.

It is a plague that Red State constituents suffer from even more than we in New York.

For example: Dollar General Stores, the Bergdorf’s Department Stores of modern rural America, are magnets for violent crime and killing, according to research compiled by Pro Publica’s Alec McGillis. As retail has crumbled thanks to the internet, super-discount stores have proliferated all over America. Shoppers can buy Chinese made cheap stuff, everything from socks to flashlights to bug spray, dishes, towels, even framed art.  They are so successful that their 19,000 stores are within five miles of 75 percent of the U.S. population. Business is so good here that the company is considering expanding internationally. (It also, no surprise, contributes to Republicans.)

Dollar Stores are the late capitalist American version of Soviet State run GUM department stores. And sadly, no all-American enterprise earns its flag without gun violence. The Gun Violence Archive recorded more than 200 gun incidents at Family Dollar or Dollar General Stores from 2017 to 2020. Fifty people died. The incidents included carjackings, bad drug deals, and employees being pistol whipped or otherwise beaten, according to MacGillis.

We don’t know if while in town, Mr. Tiffany went to breakfast at Tiffany’s or whether he and his fellow political performers sampled the Times Square Chili’s, as Mike Pence and Mother did when they visited from Indiana to accept the role of Trump’s Veep.

Eventually, they traveled back to DC - at taxpayer expense for sure.

Whatever the visiting clowns did, they were engaged in an egregious dereliction of duty as “Judiciary Committee" members fooling around in Manhattan while all over America, guns are the leading cause of death among children. 

The committee has no known plans to ask the Centers for Disease Control to tally the latest gun death figures. In 2020 more than 45,000 Americans died by gun. Nearly eight in ten murders that year involved a gun.

While the Judiciary Committee trolls the nation’s great city, the city’s gun control efforts hang in limbo too, in dire danger of being forcibly ended by extremists in Washington. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court last year ruled in favor of an upstate New York gun group’s challenge to New York’s gun control laws.  In response, the state legislature in special session passed another law - which gun lovers immediately challenged. As of January 2023, the Supreme Court is allowing the city to maintain concealed carry gun control ban but just “for now” — while appeals courts consider whether to force New Yorkers to put up with allowing every man woman and of-age child with a gun to pack heat.

Lives hang in the balance. The clowns perform.