I see an America where criminal justice is applied equally and any law that disproportionately incarcerates people of color is repealed.
...pretty much every criminal law disproportionately incarcerates African-Americans, from murder on down. Thus, [Sen.] Paul sees an America where, at most, only white collar offenses are against the law -- in other words, an essentially lawless America.The touchstone for repealing a criminal law must be whether it makes sense to ban the behavior in question and to enforce a ban. The touchstone can't be the ability of "people of color" to comply with the law. Otherwise, our criminal laws would be subject, in effect, to a "criminals of color veto."
Has any sane figure on the left proposed that we dispense with every law that disproportionately incarcerates people of color? I don't know. But in civil rights law, from which the legal concept of disparate impact springs, even serious leftists agree, at least in public, that an employer (for example) can maintain policies that disproportionately harm African-Americans (for example) if the policies are justified by business necessity....
I assume that Paul will reformulate his position on repealing criminal laws, just as he's been walking away from other, more defensible libertarian agenda items. But the fact that he articulated a lunatic view of criminal law in arguably the most important speech he has ever made cannot be overlooked...
It's beyond astonishing that a (quasi) serious Presidential candidate would say such a thing. Pandering to the race hucksters of the world is bad enough, but this goes beyond mere pandering. It's literally the case that, so far as I know, neither Al Sharpton nor Louis Farrakhan has said anything like this.
I agree almost entirely with your assessment of the speech but disagree completely with your headline. My only quibble on the speech content is that I believe the hucksters on the left often make the same formulation, that if more blacks are incarcerated because of a law, the law is racist.
I abandoned any support for his presidential run over a year ago for this very reason along with foreign policy.
However, most of America does not have your intellect, Bill. I think many are fooled by the premise. Look at how many people are against NYC policing policies for the same reason.
His campaign will not explode because of such idiocy. At worst, I suspect it is a wash.
"Disproportionate impact" is one the most bankrupt, meritless, and misleading concepts of the progressive movement. Can any reasonable person deny that the impact of a particular course of action on a group should not be directly proportionate to the frequency of the underlying behavior of that group.
All the early 2016 announcements make me laugh. The reality is the 2016 race will be the matchup everyone has been waiting for over 20 years -
Bush v. Clinton II.
That would be a violation of the Eighth Amendment.