Jeff Sessions Suggests You Just Say Yes to the War on Drugs
For all the foolishness that's come out of Camp Runamuck since it opened its D.C. satellite camp in January, the appointment of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III as the nation's top cop may well go down in history as the worst of it. (Although Scott Pruitt at EPA may give JeffBo a run for his money.) It is now conventional wisdom that one of the worst mistakes the country ever made was launching its idiotic, wasteful "war"on drugs. In the three decades in which this "war" has been waged, we have lost two generations of African-Americans to the prison system, shaved the Bill of Rights down to a nub, tied the hands of the judiciary, and, finally, made not an appreciable dent in the problem of drug use and drug addiction. We have blessed ourselves with private prisons and militarized police forces, so there is that.
Prior to the ascension of President* Trump, there was a strong, evolving, and bipartisan consensus that it was time to call a truce on the "war" we were making on our own citizens. The country was getting sensible about marijuana and mandatory minimum sentences at the same time; conservatives abandoned simplistic law 'n order coding and hopped on the bandwagon of criminal justice reform; in many cases, they took the wheel on it. And, at least rhetorically, the response to the opioid crisis was more reasoned and measured than the response to the crisis of crack cocaine was-and the reasons for that are worth exploring. But nobody wants to, least of all JeffBo. Over the weekend, we learned that this brief, fragile truce had ended.
From The Washington Post:
Law enforcement officials say that Sessions and Cook are preparing a plan to prosecute more drug and gun cases and pursue mandatory minimum sentences. The two men are eager to bring back the national crime strategy of the 1980s and '90s from the peak of the drug war, an approach that had fallen out of favor in recent years as minority communities grappled with the effects of mass incarceration. Crime is near historic lows in the United States, but Sessions says that the spike in homicides in several cities, including Chicago, is a harbinger of a "dangerous new trend" in America that requires a tough response.
This Cook fellow seems to have a real hangman's view of the human condition-or, at least, the condition of humans who don't look like him. He also has a real gift for unintentional irony.
"The federal criminal justice system simply is not broken. In fact, it's working exactly as designed," Cook said at a criminal justice panel at The Washington Post last year.
I'll bet it is.
(To his credit, a federal judge in Baltimore has already kicked ol' JeffBo where the sun don't shine.)
Of course, the great body of the Republican Party is scared chicken of the issue, which makes those few sincere Republicans pushing criminal justice reform all the more remarkable. One of the latter is decidedly not Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
After GOP lawmakers became nervous about passing legislation that might seem soft on crime, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declined to bring the bill to the floor for a vote. "Sessions was the main reason that bill didn't pass," said Inimai M. Chettiar, the director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. "He came in at the last minute and really torpedoed the bipartisan effort."
That's OK, because JeffBo has a couple of old standbys standing by.
Still, Sessions's remarks on the road reveal his continued fascination with an earlier era of crime fighting. In the speech in Richmond, he said, "Psychologically, politically, morally, we need to say - as Nancy Reagan said - 'Just say no.'"
And, of course, from a speech he gave in Richmond not long ago.
"When you fight crime you have to fight it where it is, and you may have at some point an impact of a racial nature that we hate to see. But if it's done properly it's the right thing."
Of course, what can possibly go wrong?
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