The amnesty lobby suffered a major setback over the past few years, but the pro-crime lobby, backed by most of the same people, is still going strong and pushing its agenda forward. Republican senators who have opposed this have buckled or been browbeaten into backing the pro-crime bill. But Senator Tom Cotton, swiftly emerging as one of the most conservative voices in the Senate, is fighting this.
Sen. Tom Cotton, the hawkish upstart who’s already made waves on the Iran nuclear deal and government surveillance programs, is now leading a new rebellion against a bipartisan effort to overhaul the criminal justice system — hoping to torpedo one of the few pieces of major legislation that could pass Congress in President Barack Obama’s final year.
Bipartisan these days means left-wing. Bipartisan pieces of legislation involve Republicans caving to the left. And this is one of the ugliest and worst examples.
GOP tensions over a bill that would effectively loosen some mandatory minimum sentences spilled over during a party lunch last week, when Cotton (R-Ark.), the outspoken Senate freshman, lobbied his colleagues heavily against the legislation, according to people familiar with the closed-door conversation. The measure passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last fall with bipartisan support.
“It would be very dangerous and unwise to proceed with the Senate Judiciary bill, which would lead to the release of thousands of violent felons,” Cotton said later in an interview with POLITICO. “I think it’s no surprise that Republicans are divided on this question … [but] I don’t think any Republicans want legislation that is going to let out violent felons, which this bill would do.”
Some Republicans do, because their masters want it. But the tide is once again beginning to turn.
Risch stressed this message, according to one Republican source: Shouldn’t the GOP be a party of law and order?
That's what Republicans used to be. It's what they still should be. But there is a good deal of rot within the camp. In the early days of Ferguson, some conservative sites and personalities took the side of the rioters and blathered on about the mean scary vehicles. A troubling number of Republican candidates wrote essays for the Brennan Center, some reading almost exactly the same.
But pro-crime policies are as popular with the base as illegal alien amnesty.
But the deepening Republican split over reforming key elements of the criminal justice system — an effort years in the making that has been powered by an influential right-left coalition — may imperil whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ultimately will take up the measure later in this election year.
Oh no! Not a bipartisan McConnell piece of legislation. The horror, the humanity.
Conservatives opposing the legislation are coalescing around Cotton’s view — despite strong pushback from bill supporters — that the measure could lead to the early release of people convicted and imprisoned for violent crimes. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), once a supporter of easing mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenders, has also made this argument. And there’s stiff resistance in pockets of the Republican Party to do anything that might erode its tough-on-crime reputation.
Hardest hit? Grover Norquist.
“We can no longer ignore the cost of our prison population,” Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, said at a hearing on the issue last week. “We must not turn our backs on the families that are being torn apart by needlessly harsh prison sentences that do not make us safer.”
Better than the families torn apart by being murdered, raped or violently assaulted. Those are the families that Leahy and every Dem or GOP supporter of pro-crime policies are turning their backs on.
In December, former Attorney General John Ashcroft — who, like Mukasey, served in the Bush administration — and Rudy Giuliani, who presided over a steep decline in crime as mayor of New York City in the 1990s, wrote to congressional leaders with concerns over the Senate bill. They warned that the legislation would bring “significant risks to public safety” and raised worries about the bill’s retroactive provisions.
“Our system of justice is not broken,” they wrote in the Dec. 10 letter to McConnell and Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). “Mandatory minimums and proactive law-enforcement measures have caused a dramatic reduction in crime over the past 25 years, an achievement we cannot afford to give back.”
The argument that we have low crime so we can dismantle the justice system and free the criminals is like arguing that since we have low levels of food poisoning, we can just start adding lead and plutonium to all the food and it will be okay. The pro-crime argument is completely deranged. It's so crazy that it makes illegal alien amnesty look sensible by comparison.