mycatharsis.com

For all the talk I’ve heard from conservatives (including myself at one time) about judges ‘legislating from the bench’, I can’t understand why there’s no outrage about politicians trying to act as judges from the bully pulpit.  Now our new attorney general (a former federal judge himself)  is appealing to Congress to block inmates who have been found by our Supreme Court to have been sentenced to unfairly long terms from getting a chance to appeal their sentences.

Mukasey, who is to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, said releasing all the inmates eligible under the Sentencing Commission’s guidelines could increase violent crime in communities and clog up courts.

COULD is the key word here.  Yes, I’ll grant that it might increase violent crime, and that should be a cause for concern in a percentage of cases, but that is not at all clear.  And in either case, why isn’t the U.S. Sentencing Commission able to make that determination on a case by case basis? Why must Congress pass a blanket law? But clogging up the courts?  That’s gotta be one of the lousiest excuses I’ve ever heard for keeping inmates who’ve already been found to be unconstitutionally sentenced from getting a chance to appeal that sentence!  “Sure, the Supreme Court has found thousands of people were sentenced in ways too harsh to pass constitutional muster.  But we can’t let them appeal their sentences because it’s too much work for us!”

If Congress blocks the new guidelines for all but the nonviolent first offenders, Mukasey repeated past Justice Department pledges to consider “changes to the current statutory differential between crack and powder cocaine offenses.”

Complete and utter horsecrap, and both sides know it.  Basically Mukasey is saying here, “Congress, if you protect us from the implications of this Supreme Court decision, we promise we’ll CONSIDER doing what the Supreme Court is telling us, by this decision, we must do now.  Yes we’ve promised that before  and done nothing, but we really mean it this time!”  I used to feel bad for saying such cynical things about our government.  But quite frankly, the way this Justice Department has acted under this president, I feel like I’m simply stating fact as opposed to irrational blather.

The decision that has our AG up in arms is Kimbrough v. United States, one of a decreasing number of decisions with support from both sides of the court.  A 7-2 decision with liberals such as Ginsburg and Stevens joining with conservatives such as Roberts and Scalia.  And this decision itself is simply an extension of United States v. Booker, another decision that  drew agreement from both sides of the courts left and right wings.  In other words, these are not highly controversial court decisions, the decision that these sentencing guidelines are ADVISORY and not mandatory seemed to be a fairly easy decision for these justices, no matter who they voted for.

Yes, drugs are most certainly bad, mmmkay?  And crack is as bad as they get, destroying lives with just a few uses.  But keeping thousands and thousands of people locked away for nothing more than making an incredibly bad decision about what to put in their own bodies makes no sense. It’s neither constitutional nor compassionate.  And perhaps if we worried about locking up only the truly criminal, we’d have more resources to put towards important and understaffed areas of law enforcement, such as witness protection.