Posted on 09/13/2016 9:10:28 AM PDT by Kaslin
While professional athletes like second-string NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick engage in immature “protests” over some perceived peeve with our country’s criminal justice system, Republicans in Congress are diligently working to meaningfully improve America’s justice system. Whether they succeed in their historic effort, however, remains up in the air and its future may very well be decided this week.
Currently, three bills pending in the U.S. House – the Sentencing Reform Act, the Recidivism Risk Reduction Act, and the Criminal Code Improvement Act -- remain backed by bipartisan coalitions both inside and outside the government. As anyone who has maintained even a passing acquaintance with congressional goings-on in recent years knows, cooperation between Left and Right on any issue is unusual; and something that is extremely rare on a matter as substantive as criminal justice reform.
While the “social justice” movement espoused by far Left radicals like Black Lives Matter has poisoned much of the public debate surrounding justice reform, genuine criminal justice reform lead by Republicans in the House and Senate, is a truly worthy cause that all conservatives should support. As highlighted recently in remarks by FreedomWorks CEO Adam Brandon in support of the proposals, “Our justice system is in crisis. Our prison populations and budgets have ballooned out of control. Americans are being crippled by sentences disproportional to their crime. Our system should rehabilitate and reform those in need, not warehouse nonviolent offenders and burden our nation.”Far more than in the past, support for criminal justice reform among conservatives is growing; with many of the reforms touching on principles long-favored by conservatives. For example, even as the current proposed reforms strengthen due process rights – a principle not always championed by traditional conservatives – at the same time they would begin to reverse the trend toward systemic over-criminalization that long has bothered conservatives, and which distracts police officers from pursuing real criminal activity such as violent crimes.
Also, the reforms incorporated in the pending legislation would help to keep families together; a benefit conservatives have argued for years would dramatically help reduce poverty and steer young people away from future criminal behavior. And, perhaps most important to conservatives, the Sentencing Reform Act alone is estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to save $769 million in taxpayer funds, by finally addressing prison overcrowding.
Criminal justice reform truly is a historic win for conservative values. Unfortunately, this is precisely why its critics resort to fear-mongering, not facts, in attempting to derail this landmark effort.
One need only look to several conservative states that have enacted similar criminal justice reform bills, to see the benefits of what is now being proposed nationally. States including Georgia, Texas, and South Carolina have witnessed significant drops in incarceration rates and criminal recidivism, as a direct result of state-level criminal justice reforms. Taxpayers in these states have enjoyed the added benefit of saving millions of dollars that would otherwise be spent on a broken system. “Texas used to spend billions locking people up for minor offenses,” former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who helped spearhead reform in his state, remarked on his efforts. “We implemented common sense policies that made not only Texas tough, but also smart on crime.”
Perry justifiably calls these results “extraordinary,” noting that already the crime rate in the Lone Star State has dropped to its lowest levels since 1968, while saving its taxpayers nearly $2.0 billion.
This is why the efforts now underway in Congress, spearheaded by GOP leaders Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, are so critical. The current prison crisis worsens with each new inmate added to the federal prison system by an outdated sentencing structure that allows for little, if any discretion for judges to differentiate between drug kingpins and non-violent, low level offenders. And, with more than 4,000 federal criminal laws on the books already, and countless more overlapping regulatory and state laws, criminal justice reform reduces the risk that innocent and otherwise non-violent offenders will be swept into the ruinous criminal justice system that should be focusing on the truly heinous criminals.
We stand at the crossroads of a truly historic moment in America, in which a decades-overdue overhaul of the criminal justice system promises to make our country a far better place in which to pursue the American dream. The conservative case for sentencing reform is clear, and the time for action is now.
The best reform would be to get rid of all the uniform civil and criminal codes, brought to us by Euroweenies and progressives from Continental law over the last few decades and return to our original Common Law tradition. That tradition had developed threads of equity; sort of a balance of justice and mercy that overly complex statues can never achieve.
Our Nation is at a historic Crossroad - if Trump doesn’t win, we will likely never spend any time on the proper path and we can kiss the Freedom of the People, and American control of our governance, goodbye forever.
Very nice picture accompanying the article. It really shows “who my government is”. I feel that I am in good hands. Law and Order is over-rated anyway ...
Proven Common Law vs the legal theory du jour.
“The best reform would be to get rid of all the uniform civil and criminal codes, brought to us by Euroweenies and progressives from Continental law over the last few decades and return to our original Common Law tradition.”
Yes, but is that within the competence of our ethically challenged legal sector?
The very first business should be in the *structural* reform of the judiciary. That is simply, the elimination of bottlenecks, the demographic rearrangement of the courts, and the retirement and consolidation of courts that are either redundant or just serve as barriers.
And, in the process, “retire” many of the bad and ideological judges by eliminating their jobs. Sure they can still call themselves judges, but they no longer have courts.
The biggest bottleneck is the 8,000 and rising number of cases appealed from the circuit courts to the SCOTUS every year. This is not just a problem of raw numbers, but of jurisdiction.
That is, federal judges can “make new laws” by federalizing what had been local and state laws. Deciding that, no matter how far fetched, they either have a constitutional decision within; or they come under the blanket of often very unrelated federal judicial precedent.
There needs to be a mechanism in the lower federal courts to say “this is not a federal issue”, and take the case from a federal judge for return to the individual state courts for decision.
It likewise needs to be accompanied by a provision that the merits of the case, if they are indeed federal, have already been decided in other cases, so are no longer actionable by the judiciary. A great example of this are court cases arising from petty disputes in public schools.
Things like school dress codes, what student newspapers can publish, wearing disruptive t-shirts, etc., etc. They have all been decided before, but time and again suck up appellate court time and huge amounts of money. Lower federal judges should be inclined to dismiss such cases out of hand as already having been decided.
Yes, but is that within the competence of our ethically challenged legal sector?
Not unless we get just a few good ones on the SCOTUS bench and lawyers educated in the history of the Constitution, the English Common Law and the Natural Law and their influence on our exceptionalism.
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