Free Republic

Before Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) electrified conservatives with his denunciation of liberal media bias at the GOP presidential debate last week, he took a little-noticed position on a major crime bill before the Senate that set him apart from the politically powerful Koch brothers. Taking the side of law-and-order conservatives on an issue that could emerge as a major focus of the 2016 presidential campaign, Cruz came out against the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act (S. 2123) on the grounds that the legislation, which will retroactively reduce the sentences of thousands of federal prison inmates, could lead to the release...

Last Friday, President Obama wrote 46 letters to men and women across the United States that will change their lives. “Dear Jerry,” Obama wrote to one man, “I wanted to personally inform you that I will be granting your application for commutation.” Jerry, like the others, is a convicted drug offender who, Obama claims, should long ago have served his time and been released back into society. Instead, tens of thousands of other low-level drug offenders continue to fester in federal prison; the consequence of overzealous, 1980s-era mandatory minimum sentencing requirements that have led to dangerous overcrowding in the federal...

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, had the voice of a liberal and a libertarian when he wrote a piece for the Brennan Center for Justice in April that ripped the federal criminal justice system on three fronts -- "overcriminalization, harsh mandatory minimum sentences, and the demise of jury trials." "Draconian mandatory minimum sentences," he wrote, can produce sentences that far outweigh the crime, especially for "nonviolent drug offenders." The Ted Cruz who wrote that piece -- and co-sponsored the Smarter Sentencing Act of 2015 with Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Dick Durbin, D-Ill. -- may not be familiar to those following...

The only defense that ordinary people have against the pro-crime network is to hold politicians accountable for “sentencing reform”. As Senator Cruz said, “If a prisoner that we voted to release goes and commits another crime, another murder, another sexual assault, another robbery, we can fully expect to be held accountable by our constituents.”When a police officer is murdered by a drug dealer, we must look at the politicians who helped him do it. When an ordinary person is murdered, raped or robbed, not only the criminal record of the attacker, but the “sentencing reform” record of the politicians who...

Conservative mega-donor Charles Koch says reforming the criminal justice system to make it more fair to the "disadvantaged" will be a major one of his priorities in 2015.The businessman said that the criminal justice system needs reforms aimed at “making it fair and making [criminal] sentences more appropriate to the crime that has been committed.” “Over the next year, we are going to be pushing the issues key to this, which need a lot of work in this country,” Koch told The Wichita Eagle in an interview published Saturday night. “And that would be freedom of speech, cronyism and how that relates to opportunities for...

Aren't Democrats supposed to be more enlightened on this issue?Yesterday the Brennan Center for Justice published an essay collection that highlights both the emerging bipartisan consensus in favor of criminal justice reform and the vacuousness of some politicians who claim to support that cause. The book, titled Solutions: American Leaders Speak Out on Criminal Justice, features worthy and substantive contributions from, among others, Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), not to mention nonpoliticians such as UCLA criminologist Mark Kleiman and Marc Levin, founder of Right on Crime. Even New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is...

With the presidential race the focus of most of the media attention, a major division among Senate Republicans over so-called "criminal justice reform" has gotten little attention. But the liberal media are now beginning to notice that conservatives are mounting a campaign to stop a piece of legislation that has been advertised as a major part of President Obama's left-wing legacy. The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act (S. 2123) would release thousands of criminals back on the streets at a time of rising crime rates, in the name of reducing what liberals call "mass incarceration."