Importantly to all conservatives: right now the left is doing something that military tacticians always warn against, called “reinforcing defeat”. It is one of the most important military truisms, that you should *never* reinforce defeat, thinking that you can turn the situation around.
But the left is doing it with gun control. Which means that the time is ripe for conservatives to hit the left, hard, from an unexpected direction, that they are not prepared to defend.
Specifically, the best attack the conservatives can launch right now is to “streamline” the death penalty for violent criminals, by limiting how federal judges can interfere with the process.
Say that, instead of it taking 20 years to execute a horrific mass murderer after sentencing, it should take no more than 5 years. This is a reasonable goal, and one that can be accomplished with just three changes to the federal law.
1) Declare that the individual states are *competent* to carry out a death penalty as they see fit, without interference. They may continue to use lethal injection, or use electrocution, gas chamber, firing squad, or even hanging if they choose to do so, without a federal judge being able to intercede because of the means or technique of the execution.
2) Move all federal death penalty appeals to the front of the federal docket, the appeal to be heard within six months; and the defense, prosecution and judge are limited to a single, one month delay each in the course of the appeal, which must be concluded within one year from when it was first made.
3) Limit the ability of federal judges to overturn a state death penalty decision, *or* to issue a “directed acquittal” to the trial court. Instead, if they see a constitutional problem, they can order the original court to reevaluate the case in light of that or those problems. And if the trial court still affirms the sentence, the appeal is over.
That is a good idea. Federal judges need to be limited in a lot of other areas, too.