Fox News’ Andy McCarthy Pooh-Poohs Trump’s Crime Executive Order

Fox News’ Andy McCarthy pooh-poohed an executive order signed by President Donald Trump targeting cashless bail policies on Monday during an appearance on The Story with Martha MacCallum later that afternoon.

Guest host Gillian Turner kicked off the segment by observing that Trump’s “new executive order signed today threatens to revoke federal funds to any jurisdiction in the United States that continues to employ no cash bail. D. C., along with states including New Mexico, New Jersey and Illinois, have abolished, or nearly abolished cash bail completely,” and that he was was ordering Attorney General Pam Bondi “to identify places in the United States that are still using cashless bail and to then identify them to him so that he can revoke their federal funding. This obviously, you know, teeing up another battle royale between the federal government and the states.”

“Well, I think Gillian, that it’s a smart fight for him to pick politically. I don’t think he’s going to get very far with it legally, because it’s Congress that actually ends up making the laws, including for the District of Columbia. And it’s Congress that sets the terms for funding to the states,” replied McCarthy. “So unless they’ve given the president a license, or an avenue to cut off the funding on account of state procedural criminal rules, he’ll probably have a tough time in court with that.”

He expanded on this thought later in the interview:

If you’re talking about foreign affairs, the president has very broad power. If you’re taking about domestic affairs, there’s a division of authority between the federal government and the state government. When you’re talking about the enforcement of law, when the Constitution was adopted originally, the thought was that most, if not all law enforcement was going to be done at the state level. Now we obviously have much more federal law enforcement than we had back then, but the states are still deemed to be supreme with respect to the enforcement of criminal laws within their jurisdiction. So the extent to which the federal government can pressure them to adopt federal policies is minimal.

Watch above via Fox News.