Rare News Desk
On Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder released the Department of Justice’s guidelines on who may apply for their newly-lenient standards for federal prisoner clemency.
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In brief, nonviolent individuals who have served at least ten years, who would be sentenced under less harsh laws now, and who have been awfully good in prison may try their luck in petitioning the DOJ to look over their cases, and then possibly pass them on to the president. (The reportedly unmerciful and controversial lawyer in charge of the DOJ’s pardon office has also resigned.)
The move is expected to help up to 2000 of the the U.S.’s 200,000 federal prisoners, nearly all drug offenders.
Predictably, there has been some conservative backlash — though not nearly as much as there might have been if not for heroic dudes like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) who have pushed hard against mandatory minimums — to this about-damn-time step from Holder, Obama, and the DOJ, based mainly on the slur that this is the administration attempting to get around laws.
That point is debatable. No good small (or no) government fan supports the too-powerful executive branch. Even when they do awesome things like stop harassing people in Colorado and Washington state over their lax drug laws, there is an uncomfortable feeling of thanking the King for being magnanimous that day.
The power of executive pardon, though, is ingrained in the Constitution. The Bushes, Clinton, and Carter used it generously. Mr. Militarized Drug War, himself, Ronald Reagan, used the pardon more than any presidents since.
But some perspective, historical and personal, is necessary before reacting to this announcement as if it’s Fast and Furious the sequel, or, as Andrew C. McCarthy put it over at PJ Media, “another transparent usurpation of legislative power.”
Even if McCarthy were right, there are more important things to worry about, and other reasons to support the move. If Obama is cheating here, good. It’s the best thing he’s done in years.
This may be a small thing, these new standards. But if they help a few thousand people, it will be worth it. The criminal justice system in America is an immoral, unconstitutional, nightmarish blot on this country’s supposed moral high ground in the world.
Honestly, the bigger question is whether Obama, who most assuredly does not walk the civil liberties talk, will actually let this turn into something bigger than a token nod to the libertarian and principled left peanut gallery who have been booing a lot in the past few years.
We shouldn’t discount the amazing effect this will have on a handful of individuals, but we shouldn’t pretend that Obama just declared a war on drugs armistice. There is lots more to do.
Consider that the war on drugs isn’t necessarily constitutional. Certainly, it isn’t federally. The Ninth and 10th Amendments suggest that a strict constitutionalist nation (what a concept!) might allow some state-wide drug restrictions. Where we are now, with a prison population that has quadrupled in the last 30 years, suggests that drastic measures need to be taken in stopping this lunatic policy.
Ah, but that’s what liberals would say, right? Needing to do something — NOW! — is invariably the excuse for ramming through some half-way thought-out policy through the proper channels, then letting Americans (or folks abroad, depending) suffer through its ill effects and totally unpredictable horrible consequences of the hammer that is the state.
The difference between healthcare, or gun control, or free food for all the poor people now! before we think too hard about it, and Obama and co. holding up their hands and backing away from Colorado, or enthusiastically digging into the task of letting people out of prison is simple.
Nobody has a positive right to healthcare, or unarmed neighbors, or free food because that requires something from someone else. But a government that could flip a switch and let every nonviolent drug offender out of prison would be a good one — even if that is a grand decision, even if that arguably undermines the precious rule of law.
The people in prison have an inalienable right to go about their business as long as they harm nobody else. And U.S. laws have, in myriad ways, been violating that right for decades.
That’s what bad, big government does. It confuses positive and negative liberties. It says you need permission first. It says you do not own you, or your labor, or your profits. It says, let’s treat people like puppets, with cynical politicians policy-makers holding the strings.
People in prison for harming nobody but themselves (or paying, willing customers) deserve to be let out today. Not when the laws change, not when 100 percent of the U.S. is ready to accept that the war on drugs was a disaster — now.
Obama should let them all out, and say, “Sorry about that.”
