Senate Judiciary Chair Declares Defeat In War On Drugs

The Senate’s most senior member lamented the utter failure of the so-called “War on Drugs” and other draconian criminal justice policies Wednesday morning. During an address on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s 2013 agenda, Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) expressed alarm over high rates of imprisonment, harsh mandatory minimum sentences and federal crackdowns of marijuana laws legal under state law. “We have imprisoned people who should not be there and we have wasted money that should be spent on other things,” he said.

There are too many people, too many young people, too many minorities, too many from the inner city who are serving time in jail for people who might have done the same thing but have the money to stay out and are not there. What I say is if you have a youngster in the inner city buying $100 worth of cocaine for example could end up going to prison for years. If you have somebody on Wall Street buying the same 100 dollars from their local dealer, if they’re caught, they’ll be reprimanded and they may even have to do on Park Avenue a week of public service. That’s not right.

Responding to a question on the acclaimed War on Drugs documentary The House I Live In, he added:

[T]he fact that so many people, especially young people, go to prison for a relatively minor thing, a drug offense. And then you ask, why can’t they get jobs afterward? Why do they have problems from then on?

I think we have spent tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars on the so-called War on Drugs. Well, we’ve lost.

After laying out Judiciary Committee plans to effectively protect public safety by prioritizing the immediate reauthorization of the Republican-obstructed Violence Against Women Act and holding hearings on gun violence prevention, Leahy focused on those elements of the criminal justice system that send the wrong people to jail – and for too long.

“I say this as a former prosecutor … I think the reliance at the state and federal level on mandatory minimums has been a great mistake,” he said. “I’m not convinced that it has lowered crime, but I know it has imprisoned people who should not be there.”

He also advocated for national standards and oversight of forensics testing, saying, “If you have labs that do not give you right results, and you think you can close a case by sending the wrong person to prison, you’ve done nothing for the safety of people” and “you have tragedy of having an innocent person in prison.”

Responding to a question about federal enforcement of marijuana laws, Leahy reiterated his concern that federal resources are misallocated to marijuana crackdowns while murders and robberies go unsolved. “It was also my feeling as a prosecutor,” he said. “I found more important things to do.” President Obama expressed a similar sentiment recently when he told Barbara Walters the administration has “bigger fish to fry” than target marijuana users, but that has not stopped prosecutors from cracking down on medical marijuana distributors in seeming compliance with state law.

Leahy joins a number of world leaders, including Bill Clinton, who have recently blasted the failed War on Drugs approach. Mandatory minimum sentences, discriminatory crackdowns and criminalization of public health issues are all a part of the tough-on-crime system that has sent more of our own to prison than any other country, under the guise of improved public safety.

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Rep. Gutierrez moves from Financial Services Committee to Judiciary for immigration reform

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) is taking a leave of absence from the House Financial Services Committee to serve on the House Judiciary Committee to help pass new immigration reform legislation.

Gutierrez, the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Immigration Task Force, recently met with a number of Republican lawmakers who are likely to play a prominent role in upcoming immigration reform negotiations. He discussed immigration reform with both Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) in December.

Gutierrez, who was the third-ranking Democrat on the Financial Service Committee, will likely be the 13th ranking Democrat on the Judiciary committee. The move was announced Friday.

President Obama has vowed to make immigration reform a top priority of his second term and already a number of legislators have begun initial talks on immigration reform legislation.

"All of the road signs are pointed in the right direction, and I felt I must be on the Judiciary Committee during this Congress to help the others on the Committee get immigration reform to the finish line," Gutierrez said in a statement. "We are poised for serious action to fix our broken immigration system, a top priority for Democrats, for the Democratic leadership, and for the president, and I have spoken to numerous Republicans in the House and Senate who want to get it done."

Gutierrez thanked the Democratic leadership for approving the move.

"I look forward to working with the chairman and the subcommittee chairmen and the Ranking Member, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), and the Immigration Subcommittee Ranking Leader, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), in crafting bipartisan immigration reform that fixes our broken immigration system," Gutierrez also said in the statement.

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Senate Republicans Stack Judiciary Committee With Two More Constitutional Extremists

Two years ago, when Senate Republicans needed to fill a vacant seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, they tapped Tea Party Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) — a senator who believes that federal child labor laws, FEMA, food stamps, the FDA, Medicaid, income assistance for the poor, and even Medicare and Social Security violate the Constitution. This year, they needed to fill two seats on the Senate body responsible for overseeing the Constitution. Once again, Senate Republicans chose to fill these seats with senators who believe the Constitution in nothing more than a block of clay that can be formed into whatever the Tea Party wants it to say.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is no stranger to conspiracy theories; he published an article last year claiming that the United Nations and George Soros are at the head of a global conspiracy to eliminate the game of golf. (Seriously. We aren’t making this up.) So his understanding of the Constitution is similarly idiosyncratic. As head of a conservative think tank’s Tenth Amendment project, Cruz co-authored an unconstitutional plan to nullify the Affordable Care Act — claiming that two states can ignore the Constitution and federal law simply by joining together in such lawlessness.

Cruz is among the most skilled attorneys in the country, but he devoted his outsized talents to reshaping the Constitution into his own far right image. His first campaign ad touted his successful work to help Texas kill a Mexican national in violation of America’s treaty obligations, and he believed in using lawsuits to tear down the health care safety net long before the Affordable Care Act’s opponents brought a completely meritless legal theory to the Supreme Court and nearly convinced the entire conservative bloc to sign onto it in its entirety. Cruz’s campaign touted his attempt to “to strike down portions of the Medicare Prescription Drug program as an unconstitutional intrusion in the sovereign authority of the States.” Although Cruz is more careful in his rhetoric than Sen. Lee, perhaps the most damning aspect of Cruz’s record is the staunch opponent of national child labor laws and Medicare’s endorsement of Cruz’s constitutional vision. In Lee’s words, “Ted is one of our nation’s leading defenders of the Tenth Amendment. He is a champion for limiting the power, size, and spending of the federal government.”

Cruz is joined on the Judiciary Committee by Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who actually thinks his own election to the Senate should be unconstitutional. Flake endorsed repealing the Seventeenth Amendment, which replaced a system that led to “rampant and blatant corruption, letting corporations and other moneyed interests effectively buy U.S. Senators,” with our current system — electing senators.

Like Cruz, Flake also embraced rethinking the Tenth Amendment as a tool to impose Tea Party values on the country long before the Tea Party even existed. In 2000, Flake signed a position statement claiming that the Departments of Commerce and Housing and Urban Development, in addition to the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities, “should be abolished, per the tenth amendment of the US Constitution.” For the record, nothing in the Tenth Amendment renders any of these things unconstitutional.

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