Sunday, December 16, 2018

Don’t be fooled: ‘Revisions’ in the prison ‘reform’ bill aren’t worth the paper they’re written on

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The Republican Party now exists for just one purpose – to undo Reagan’s successful policies on crime that led to the biggest drop in violent crime in history.
Republicans have only days left until they lose control of the trifecta of government. We have a drug trafficking and transnational gang crisis inextricably mixed up with the border and sanctuary city problem that is responsible for death mayhem at our border and in all our states. Yet they refuse to fight.
We have a health care crisis, yet they refuse to fight. We have a debt crisis, yet they refuse to fight. We have a crisis with the courts taking over our government, yet they refuse to fight.
But when it comes to letting out the worst federal drug traffickers who are involved in transnational gangs and cartels, the very “animals” for whom Trump promised the death penalty, not early release – that is the one issue for which they are willing to go to the mat.
Mitch McConnell has been pressured to schedule a vote on the First Step Act, as if the issue is a national emergency such that the Senate will work between the holidays.
The insidious promotion of this bill should concern you just as much as the bill itself. The bill has the resources of the entire political and cultural class behind it, but a few individuals successfully exposed how this bill releases some of the worst human beings from prison and offers much lighter sentencing at the front end. Proponents of the bill employed a brilliant tactic to “overdraft” the legislation to make it even worse than their talking points suggested. This allowed them to spend weeks denying those provisions were even in the bill, forcing opponents to expend all their capital exposing those “extra” provisions. Now, they are promising to revise the bill, so they look reasonable and magnanimous and will paint anyone who still opposes it as “intransigent,” even though the foundational problems still apply. And they have the masters of the “conservative” universe making this the “moral” issue of the time.
This is why many of those who opposed this bill were intimidated into supporting it based on a few changes. This is one of the most effective, time-tested legislative tactics I’ve seen throughout my career.
Read the rest from Daniel Horowitz HERE.

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