I'm having trouble recalling the exact date, but it was around 1998 when President Dole announced that, in view of the tidal wave of crime against which the country had made decent, but still insufficient, progress, he was proud to announce that his administration had secured more prison terms exceeding 20 years than his nine predecessors combined. Mr. Dole acknowledged that so many long sentences might be viewed by some as extremism. His reply was that, given the burdens the threat of ubiquitous crime impose on the practical liberty of our citizens, "extremism in the defense of liberty was no vice."
The New York Times was having none of it. Its editorial was unambiguous:
We had thought that breast-beating exhortations like "extremism in the defense of liberty" had seen their last when Barry Goldwater's landslide loss put extremism in the cold light of a sober nation's reflection.It is true that crime had risen to unacceptable levels during the George H.W. Bush Administration, but we have made six years of progress in scaling it back without President Dole's resort to criminal justice extremism.A balanced and mature approach to justice requires that a President show at least a modicum of respect to a consensus that has lasted for more than 50 years, through prior administrations and political climates of all stripes. When, to the contrary, a chief executive's sentencing outcomes push past those of his nine predecessors combined, he has simply gone off the deep end, there's no other honest way to put it. This is not a defense of liberty. It's a defense of the President's out-of-the-mainstream ideas, a sop to the most extreme elements of his base, and it has to stop.
Fast forward to the present day. The prison population in America has been in a mostly steady decline for six years (it peaked in 2009-2010), and the federal prison population specifically has fallen for two years in a row. Violent crime, however, is on an upswing in major cities across the country. Some say this is because of increased aggressiveness by drug gangs, others blame police becoming more cautious in light of the culture war being waged against them (not to mention the increased number of police officers murdered this year). But we are suffering (actually, it's mostly minorities who are suffering) from a very significant crime upsurge. Those who deny this are being intentionally dishonest.
Against this backdrop -- falling inmate populations and rising violent crime -- the White House proudly announced earlier this month that the President has now given sentencing commutations to the next fifty Wendell Callahans a total of 562 criminals (dozens of whom had firearms as well as hard drug convictions). That number, the White House boasted, was more than Mr. Obama's nine predecessors combined.
And we are promised more to come. Lots more.
Given this state of affairs, I would be grateful to any reader who could point me to the NYT editorial -- or, actually, any editorial anywhere in the liberal press, or any paper from legal academia -- that says:
UPDATE: I'm told that I've left some of our readers scratching their heads, so I'll explain the joke. This is a lampoon of the Left's embrace of Obama's clemency extremism by contrasting it to what that same Left would say to an analogous veer to the right by a Republican President (hence the reference to "more than my nine predecessors" from "President Dole").A balanced and mature approach to justice requires that a President show at least a modicum of respect to a consensus that has lasted for more than 50 years, through prior administrations and political climates of all stripes. When, to the contrary, a chief executive's sentencing outcomes push past those of his nine predecessors combined, he has simply gone off the deep end, there's no other honest way to put it. This is not a defense of liberty. It's a defense of the President's out-of-the-mainstream ideas, a sop to the most extreme elements of his base, and it has to stop.
We often hear that the conservative view of criminal law is "out of the mainstream." What is actually out of the mainstream is Obama's commutation binge, as the White House not only admits but boasts.
The lesson is that it's not a deviation from the norm to which the Left actually objects. It's a deviation from the norm in the direction of greater public safety, which the increased use of incarceration helped produce, that causes the heartburn. When there is a deviation in favor of the interests of criminals, by contrast, it is gushingly portrayed, not as extremism, but "historic boldness."
"President Dole"? What's he president of? or was, of.
I think that's a clue that this part of the OP is satirical fiction. See also this post and this one.
Bill, I am trying to understand what you mean by "clemency extremism," especially since many of those granted clemency received sentences under statutes that Congress has now reformed. Do you think those Prez who granted lots of clemency after the end of alcohol prohibition were engaged in clemency extremism? How about Prez Ford with all his post-Vietnam clemency work?
I get that you think Obama should be criticized for being bold in this space relative to his recent predecessors, but I am not sure he is really all that bold when one takes a real historical look and clemency work throughout US history.
The concept of "clemency extremism" is not that hard to understand. When you grant more clemencies than your nine predecessors, going back more than 50 years, that is clemency extremism.
Indeed, the extreme character of the President's action is (literally) graphically illustrated by the chart the White House provided, which is in the link I provided.
Going back more than 50 years is hardly necessary to see the extremism. Nor is it useful, since the modern era of criminal law began about 50 years ago, in the Sixties. Before that, it was a different system, and comparisons thus of dubious usefulness.
For federal criminal justice purposes, Bill, isn't the era of alcohol Prohibition in the 1920s is arguably the closest parallel to the modern federal drug crime era? Certainly in terms of the use of federal criminal power to focus on trafficking of mind altering substances (and arguably federal government overreach as to state concerns and the ineffecacy of that overreach), the comparisons strike me as quite useful.
If Obama was using clemency widely in many hundreds of non-drug cases, I would see the basis for you effort to dismiss what took place on the clemency front in the 1920s and 1930s. But Obama's focus on drug offenders lead me to view the comparisons as quite historically appropriate.