Expecting the sourpuss contingent at the New York Times to give Jeff Sessions a fair shake is like expecting George Soros to have a kind word for America. So it was no surprise when the Times' hatchet job appeared a few days ago, "Jeff Sessions as Attorney General: An Insult to Justice." There was the usual wail about racism, as phony as it is ancient, but what caught my eye was this breathtakingly ignorant squib about Sen. Sessions and sentencing "reform":
Based on his record, we can form a fairly clear picture of what his Justice Department would look like:....Forget [about] any federal criminal-justice reform, which was on the cusp of passage in Congress before Mr. Trump's "law and order" campaign. Mr. Sessions strongly opposed bipartisan legislation to scale back the outrageously harsh sentences that filled federal prisons with low-level drug offenders. Instead, he called for more mandatory-minimum sentences and harsher punishments for drug crimes.
Question: Does the NYT have anyone -- really, anyone -- in Washington who actually follows justice-related legislation?
The idea the criminal justice reform was "on the cusp of passage" before the ascendancy of Trump is not just false; it's preposterous.
The sentencing reform bill was never on the cusp of passage. The day it got through the Senate Judiciary Committee (now more than a year ago) was its high water mark; it was all downhill from there. That the New York Times does not know this is impossible to believe.
Let's count the ways in which "reform" was ten million miles from the "cusp."
First, "reform" never had the support of a majority of the Republican Caucus or its leader, Sen. McConnell. Some notable Republicans favored it, yes (otherwise very sound legislators like Sens. Grassley, Lee, and Cornyn, for example), but at most it had the support of about a dozen Republican members out of 54. One does not have to be a genius to figure out what happens in that situation. And that's to say nothing of the thoughtful and vocal Republicans who came out against it, including Sen. Sessions (most prominently), and Sens. Hatch, Perdue, Vitter, Cotton, and, very importantly, Rubio and Cruz.
This was especially true of Sen. Cruz, who had supported a similar bill, the oxymoronically-named Smarter Sentencing Act, in the prior Congress. When Cruz, the candidate who finished second to Mr. Trump in the Republican sweepstakes, reversed field and joined the Sessions side, the push for mass sentencing reduction advertising itself as "reform" was very likely dead then and there.
Second, even if by some miracle it had passed the Senate, it was DOA in the House, as the NYT could not help but have known when it aimed its editorial bile at Sen. Sessions. The Senate bill had no mens rea reform, but House Republicans (and, to their credit, some House Democrats like the venerable John Conyers) would not have passed a bill without such reform. House Judiciary Chairman Goodlatte made this abundantly clear.
On the other hand, influential Senate Democrats like Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island made it equally plain that mens rea reform was effectively a poison pill. This was reinforced by the Administration; DAG Sally Yates did not leave a lot to the imagination about the extent of DOJ's opposition to Goodlatte's mens rea proposals.
(I support mens rea reform, and I expect to be writing more to help it along in the new Congress, where I do not expect it to face opposition -- and, indeed, I expect it to receive support -- from Pres. Trump. This will be one of many areas where I look forward to working with my friends in the Koch Foundation and at Heritage).
Third, as the presidential campaign moved forward, the necessary predicate for going lighter on sentencing -- falling crime -- suffered a startling reversal. It became clear (although initially and falsely denied as a statistical fluke) that crime, and violent crime in particular, had surged, starting at the end of 2014. Everyone in town knew it, because Washington and nearby Baltimore were two of the most severely affected cities suffering the murder spike (which continues today, in those cities and many others from coast to coast).
When crime is taking its biggest leap forward in decades, it's impossible for a sensible person to believe that the pro-criminal forces will (or should) get a bill through Congress lowering the cost of committing crime.
This leads to the fourth and last reason I'll discuss today: Mass sentencing reduction was never popular to begin with. Sentencing reformers routinely claimed otherwise, but only by using polls that avoided the real question. That is, pro-criminal groups tried to influence Congress by citing polls finding that citizens wanted judges have a procedure available to them by which they could base the sentence on "all the surrounding facts," or some such push-polling phrase.
However, when asked the substantive question about actual jail time (as Opinion Research Corp did in a poll about a year ago), the results were stark: By a two-to-one margin, respondents were more likely to believe that we aren't doing enough to keep drug dealers off the street than that we have too many drug traffickers in prison for too long. (My entry on the ORC poll is here: http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/crimblog/2015/11/do-americans-want-more-jail-or.html).
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One way or the other, there's a fat irony at the end of this tale. The New York Times gets its story about the supposed near-miss of sentencing reform backwards, but its overall story would be even more of a botch if the paper had gotten its facts right.
If mass sentencing reduction had in fact been on the cusp of passage, and Sen. Sessions had pulled it back, he would be even more of a hero than he is now to the mass of our citizens who want nothing more than to live in peace and safety.
To Make America Safe Again, confirm Jeff Sessions as Attorney General.
P.S. Also write to the Corrections Dept. at the NYT.
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