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US President Donald Trump is pulling out all stops to shore up his dwindling support ahead of the November presidential election, according to Myles Hoenig, an American political analyst and activist.
Hoenig, a former Green Party candidate for Congress, said in an interview with Press TV that if Trump authorized Daniel Lewis Lee’s execution, he would be following in Bill Clinton’s footsteps.
The Trump administration has officially resumed federal executions after 17 years by putting to death a convicted murderer by lethal injection following the Supreme Court’s clearance.
The Department of Justice said in a statement that Lee was pronounced dead after a lethal injection at 8:07 am (1207 GMT) at Terre Haute prison in Indiana on Tuesday.
The US Supreme Court had ruled a day earlier that the first federal executions in 17 years could proceed for the 47-year-old Lee and three other inmates, overturning a lower court’s order delaying them.
“In the United States, with yesterday’s execution of Lee by the federal government, it shows again how law and order is at the forefront of political debate. For a majority of Americans, it’s the excessive force and outright murders by our police that have been spared any accountability that is the focus of law and order. For others, like Trump and most Republicans, it’s a Blue Lives Matter, even though being a police officer isn’t even ranked in the top 10 dangerous jobs. Landscaping has more hazards, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” Hoenig said on Wednesday.
“Most executions in the US occur in the South, ironically a very ‘religious’ part of the country. For half the country that opposes capital punishment, this irony is not lost,” he stated.
“Many Democrats will assail Trump for carrying this out, whether he had any role in it or not. This was a Department of Justice decision. Trump could only have waived it. Trump is pulling out all stops to shore up his dwindling supporters, as law and order used to be the sole political domain of the Republicans,” he noted.
“Now the Democrats, starting with Bill Clinton as president and Joe Biden as Senator, made it their issue as well. During Clinton’s run for the presidency, he took time out of the campaign to go back to his Governor’s Mansion in Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally ill black man. That sealed it for Clinton and the Democratic Party as being as tough on crime as the Republicans. Even today, the likely nominee for the Democratic Party, Joe Biden, opposes defunding the police. Just to show the Democrat’s and Republican’s leadership are on the same page,” he concluded.
