Pols who back blight

Peer behind any of the urban Democratic congressmen or women who so zealously attack President Donald Trump and you will find districts and communities destroyed by the fruits of their congressmen's ideology. These cities have indeed become junkyards due to the policies their congressmen helped conceive.

Their streets are strewn with the homeless who spurn nearby clean, available shelters and alternative housing, preferring to live on the streets. Cops cannot remove them because the liberal policies their congressmen advocate won't allow it.

After these congressmen have advocated the decriminalization of drug offenses, the levels of addiction have become unmanageable and the resulting crime out of control.

On so many of their streets, the empty lots on which abandoned buildings once stood look like the missing teeth in an old man's mouth.

The open-border policies these congressmen advocate have let into our country some of the most bloodthirsty of Central American and Mexican gangs and drug cartels. Their damage, long visible on the streets of Tijuana, can now be seen in Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland and so many other cities.

President Barack Obama's program of releasing inmates from our prisons — including many with offenses involving hard drugs — has sent crime rates rising again, after years of stability.

None of these problems are new. But what is new is that they can no longer be blamed on national economic conditions. With minority unemployment at record lows and their real wages rising to new heights, there is no excuse for the urban neglect that greedy, corrupt municipal politicians — the very ones who now sit in judgment on Trump — have wrought in their own districts.

The knee-jerk reaction of these politicians — to hold their critics at bay with accusations of racism — will do nothing to improve the lot of their constituents.

The fact of the matter is that their districts' salvation could be close at hand, given the national labor shortages and strong consumer demand Trump's tax laws (that they all opposed) have generated. But these private-sector solutions to their districts' problems do not run through these congressmen's hands — or pockets — unlike federal anti-poverty programs. With no chance to skim off funding for patronage or graft, these successful private efforts to turn around the lives of millions of minorities do not interest the likes of Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md. Instead, it's all about handouts — for them and for their constituents.

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(COMMENT, BELOW)

Dick Morris, who served as adviser to former Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and former President Clinton, is the author of 16 books, including his latest, Screwed and Here Come the Black Helicopters.