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Telegraph
a day ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
If Zohran Mamdani is the future of the Democrats, they're doomed
It would be easy to call San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie the 'anti-Zohran Mamandi,' but that would fail to do the first-term leader justice. Sworn into office this past January, Lurie – like Mamdani – hails from a storied family, in this case the founders of the Levi Strauss denim dynasty. But that is where the similarities end. Lurie was elected to City Hall last November following nearly a decade of decay across San Francisco. Fuelled by the soft-on-crime policies of former district attorney Chesa Boudin, San Francisco – an urban jewel of technology and wealth – was close to becoming a failed state. Violent crime, open-air drug camps, hundreds of annual drug overdose deaths, a declining population base and desolate downtown plagued the city where I was born and raised. San Francisco's ills were akin to many large American urban centres: Philadelphia with its gruesome 'Tranq' crisis; the epidemic of deadly violent crime devastating Chicago. And, of course, Los Angeles – similarly battling an inhospitable mix of homelessness, drugs and criminality. But sized a mere 49 square miles (one-tenth that of Los Angeles), San Francisco's blight has felt uniquely acute and everywhere – all at the same time. Back in 2022, fed up voters ousted district attorney Boudin, whose laissez-faire prosecutorial approach directly led to the city's spiralling quality of life. Former San Francisco mayor London Breed attempted, honourably, to steer San Francisco back to sanity. But with a record 806 drug-related deaths in 2023 alone – and San Francisco's abandoned business core dubbed a 'ghost town' by major media – Breed lost to Lurie last November. Despite a lack of formal political experience, Lurie is hardly new to politics. His career has been shaped by public service, mostly leading large non-profits focused on tackling urban ills – often in association with scions of other local family dynasties. Lurie's flagship $500 million Tipping Point Community organisation, for instance, was established alongside the daughter of Financial Services billionaire Charles Schwab. The reliance on – rather than rejection of – the private sector for public good has been a key Lurie manoeuvre and stands in sharp contrast to Mamdani's platform. Indeed, much like former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg a decade ago, Lurie has tapped major corporations and philanthropists to fund ambitious city programs hit hard by San Francisco's $800 million budget deficit. Earlier this month, for instance, he set up an entire department, the San Francisco Downtown Development Corporation, to steer private funding to city projects. Lurie has also heavily leaned into San Francisco's abundance of visionary innovators, most notably – and understandably – in the tech world. OpenAI head Sam Altman helped lead Lurie's transition team after his election last year. Such schemes – and there are many – stand in sharp contrast to the economic expansion plan touted by Mamdani, which mostly relies on added taxes levied on New York's wealthiest residents and corporations. And not just any wealthy residents and corporations: Mamdani's own website describes his strategy as shifting 'the tax burden from overtaxed homeowners in the outer boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighbourhoods.' Such taxes would then be used to pay for low cost basic services including housing, transport and child care, even groceries. In other words – DEI meets Socialism. If this is the future of the Democrats, they are doomed. The problem with Mamdani's plans is that they rarely benefit – or are even desired – by those for whom they are designed. How else to explain the mostly white, mostly affluent New Yorkers who voted for Mamdani this week. Poor people don't need cheap housing – they need quality housing. They don't want free subway services, but reliable – and never more so – safe public transport. This requires funding, which taxes would supply, but also know-how, supply chains, available workforces and long-term commitments. And these are best delivered by partnering with the private sector. Earlier this month, for instance, crypto billionaire Chris Larsen gave $9.4 million to fund a Real Time Investigation Centre for the SFPD. Investment in law enforcement is another key area where Mamdani could learn from Lurie. Last month the mayor announced that the SFPD would be spared the 15 per cent budget cut he's implementing across city departments. Lurie has also signed an executive order to add 500 police officers to the department by, among other strategies, re-hiring recently retired officers. Lurie's law-and-order focus appears to be working: this week the SFPD made 97 arrests in a single day in San Francisco drug dens – 'the largest one-day fugitive-focused enforcement in recent history,' according to the city. While Lurie boosts officer numbers in San Francisco, Mandani has pledged to slash them. In their place, he will create a Department of Community Safety that relies on social-service schemes – 'evidence-based strategies that prevent violence and crime before they occur,' as he has described it – to maintain public order. This is a city that has finally seen a decrease in spiralling violent crime numbers – precisely because of an increase in police patrols. In 2023, for instance, New York City experienced a 20 per cent rise in arrests, a five-year record according to NYPD Chief John Chell. San Francisco may be far smaller than New York City, but its challenges – rising costs, a decreasing tax base, middle- and upper-class population declines – are eerily similar. Five years after Covid decimated both cities' business bases, mayor Lurie appears to understand that fixing San Francisco requires, above all else, public safety and a robust private-sector. Zohran Mandani should pay attention.
New York Times
25-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Michael Boudin, Independent Judge From a Family on the Left, Dies at 85
Michael Boudin, a federal appeals court judge who was a scion of one of America's best-known leftist families but who forged an independent path on the bench, died on Monday in Boston. He was 85. His death, in a memory care facility, resulted from complications of dementia and Parkinson's disease, said his nephew Chesa Boudin, the former district attorney of San Francisco. Judge Boudin — the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which covers most of New England and Puerto Rico, from 2001 to 2008 — was the odd man out in a family devoted to left-leaning causes. A former corporate lawyer with Covington & Burling, where he worked for 21 years, he was the brother of Kathy Boudin, a member of the radical Weather Underground. She served 22 years in prison for her part in the 1981 holdup of a Brink's armored truck in which two policeman and a guard were killed. His father was Leonard B. Boudin, one of the most celebrated civil liberties lawyers of the 1950s, '60s and '70s, who took a public stand against McCarthyism and whose clients included Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, and the Rev. Philip Berrigan, the antiwar activist. His parents, in their Greenwich Village home, hosted a salon for fellow liberals and leftists. And as San Francisco's district attorney, Chesa Boudin, Kathy Boudin's son, became known for his efforts to cut down on incarcerations and his intolerance of police brutality. To conservatives, he became a symbol of progressive overreach and served less than three years, before a recall election ended his tenure in 2022. Judge Boudin was not easy to pigeonhole ideologically. On the bench, he once concurred in a ruling against affirmative action at Boston Latin School — a conservative position that might have rankled his father. In private practice, he 'defended companies accused of being monopolies,' Chesa Boudin said in an interview, though Judge Boudin himself was a nephew of the independent journalist I.F. Stone, who exposed government scandals and the corporate-Defense Department nexus during the Vietnam War era and before. Judge Boudin's best known opinion dealt a critical blow to the Defense of Marriage Act, the Clinton-era law that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. In 2012, he and two other judges on the First Circuit court ruled that the law's denial of federal benefits to same-sex couples was unjust. The decision was narrow, and not necessarily an endorsement of same-sex marriage, but legal scholars considered it a significant step on the road to normalizing it. In his opinion, Judge Boudin wrote of his reservations about the law's 'effort to put a thumb on the scales and influence a state's decision as to how to shape its own marriage laws.' The decision was upheld by the United States Supreme Court a year later. The judge's caution reflected his diverse professional antecedents: He had been a law clerk to Judge Henry J. Friendly, a conservative Republican, whom he revered; nominated to the federal bench by Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a Democrat; and appointed by a Republican president, George H.W. Bush. 'He was pretty pragmatic and mainstream,' his nephew said. 'He was an intellectual who brought his full brain power to the law.' Where his parents' salon in some ways epitomized the 1960s spirit of revolt and freedom, Judge Boudin had a rather strict view of duties and responsibilities to society. In 2007, for instance, he rebuked a lower court judge for sparing a drug trafficker from prison. 'Sentences with no (or trivial) prison time have been scrutinized severely on appellate review,' Judge Boudin wrote in his ruling, adding, 'Even taking account of both cooperation and contrition, it is far from clear that adequate basis could be furnished for a near-zero prison sentence.' Chesa Boudin said: 'We're all our own people. He got along very well with his father. He was very angry with his sister for what she did. She caused a tremendous amount of harm.' Nonetheless, he added, during Ms. Boudin's years at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, N.Y. — she was released in 2003 — Judge Boudin would occasionally visit her. 'He cared about her well-being, but he was a disappointed older brother,' Chesa Boudin said. Ms. Boudin, who died in 2022 at 78, first achieved public notoriety in March 1970, when the Greenwich Village townhouse where she was living blew up. Her colleagues had set up a makeshift bomb factory there; three were killed on the spot, and Ms. Boudin, who had been showering, had to scramble away half-naked. Her brother, meanwhile, was immersed in his corporate law firm. 'While Michael was making partner at Covington & Burling, Kathy was making bombs in Greenwich Village,' David Margolick wrote in a 1992 profile of Michael Boudin in The New York Times. On Monday, his colleagues on the bench celebrated his intellectual acuity and devotion to the law. 'Judge Michael Boudin was one of the greatest federal judges of his generation, known and widely respected for his brilliance and wisdom,' Judge Sandra L. Lynch, a former First Circuit chief judge, wrote in a news release. 'His work embodied the virtues of judicial restraint and showed extraordinary mastery of the doctrines undergirding the Constitution.' Michael Boudin was born in Manhattan on Nov. 29, 1939. His mother was Jean (Roisman) Boudin, who was the sister of I.F. Stone's wife, Esther Stone. Michael attended Elisabeth Irwin High School in Manhattan and graduated from Harvard College in 1961 with a bachelor's degree. He was president of the Harvard Law Review and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1964. He was a clerk to Judge Friendly, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, covering New York, Connecticut and Vermont, from 1964 to 1965, and clerk to Justice John Harlan of the Supreme Court from 1965 to 1966. He joined Covington & Burling that year, and in 1987 became deputy assistant attorney general in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice until 1990. He was appointed that year to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where he served until 1992, when he was appointed to the circuit court. Apart from his nephew, Judge Boudin is survived by his wife, Martha A. Field, a Harvard Law professor, from whom he was separated. Judge Boudin was not keen on interviews. But Mr. Margolick, in his 1992 Times article, cited a questionnaire the judge had filled out for the Senate Judiciary Committee when it was considering his nomination. 'He described the tenets of his judicial thinking: self-discipline in defining and exercising authority, particularly over statutes, but vigilance where constitutional rights are concerned,' Mr. Margolick wrote. In a tribute on Monday, Judge Boudin's friend the retired Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer wrote: 'What Michael loved was to learn, through reading and discussion, about our nature — we human beings — how we lived together in societies. How we maintained our freedom.'
