Baumgartner’s Struggle with Causation
Rhetorical horse manure in praise of Bondi
On February 11 the House Judiciary Committee tried to gather testimony from Attorney General Pam Bondi. For the most part Democrats asked Ms. Bondi pointed questions to which she responded with personal insults rather than answers while Republicans expressed support for her work. Among the Republicans’ “questions” of Ms. Bondi, Eastern Washington freshman U.S. Representative Michael Baumgartner’s stood out in as an embarrassing display of fawning and ignorance. You can watch his “Aw-shucks” six minute performance here:
The aspect of Baumgartner’s presentation that I found particularly galling was his use of this chart upon which to praise Ms. Bondi and her DOJ:
Baumgartner: “Uh, I want to talk about the big things that Department of Justice is doing. And when I look at the dramatic decrease in crime in this country in the last year since the Trump administration has come. You’ll see the board behind me, violent crime plummets across major US cities, and I guess, so my first question would be when it comes to the big stuff, how are you guys getting this stuff so right? Uh, what is, what is the, what contributes from your perspective to this dramatic decrease in crime in major US cities under the Trump administration.”
Stop for a moment and consider the cause and effect relationship Baumgartner is implying: Homicide rates have decreased from 2024 to 2025 in many U.S. cities and, somehow, that is the result of the workings of the Department of Justice (DOJ) under Bondi and the Trump regime. Never mind that violent crime rates have been falling each year since an initial wave of crime that began in the Covid era, specifically 2020, the last year of Trump’s first term. Never mind that the DOJ is supposedly focused on investigating and prosecuting federal crimes like drug trafficking not random rapes and murders. Never mind that the response to crime in major cities is largely in the hands of local police departments, not the DOJ. Never mind that the DOJ, via its Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under Kristi Noem, has been largely occupied with terrorizing the residents of cities governed by Democrats as it rounds up mostly law-abiding immigrants and ships them off to concentration camps. Yet Baumgartner (and presumably the data-twisting Republicans who put him up to it) wants us to accept the idea that the DOJ under Pam Bondi is the cause of the drop in homicides in cities in which federal law enforcement barely has a presence.
This display by Baumgartner is rhetorical horse manure. It is an embarrassment to the citizens of Eastern Washington. The ongoing fall in cities’ rates of violent crime has as much to do with Pam Bondi and her DOJ as the fact that days are now lengthening is the causal result of our celebrations around the Christmas holidays.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry