As Democratic gains in the House have continued to rack up in the week following the Nov. 6 election, it becomes increasingly clear that cohabitation in government won’t be easy for President Trump. Democrats reportedly already have nearly 100 subpoenas waiting to go as they begin their oversight of the administration.
To some extent, this is how it has to be – and even how it should be. The Founding Fathers anticipated the adversarial nature of the branches of government, expecting them to check one another. They did not anticipate the partisan system that developed, which sometimes reduces incentives for effective congressional oversight and investigation when Congress and the president come from the same party.
Trump, rather than becoming annoyed at the new scrutiny, should learn to embrace it, and to overcome it by finding as many areas of cooperation with Democrats as he reasonably can. A Democratic Congress doesn’t have to mean that his accomplishments come to an end.
Trump already seems to understand this, as his support for criminal justice reform demonstrates. On Wednesday, Trump signaled his full-throated support for a bipartisan bill called the First Step Act, which would reform federal prison and re-entry procedures while also modestly scaling back mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug felons.
These reforms are very much in harmony with the lessons learned by conservative legislators at the state level. In Texas, for example, legislators have reduced incarceration levels and saved the state immense sums of money without suffering from increased crime. That’s because they learned to draw an important distinction between those convicts who comprise an ongoing threat to society, and those with whom society is just very upset.
Super-long sentences are a good means for protecting society long-term from its scariest and most violent criminals. But long sentences are not in themselves a terribly effective deterrent against crime – not nearly as effective as swift and certain punishment. A prison sentence is a wakeup for anyone. But for a nonviolent offender, the tail-end years he spends living at taxpayers’ expense often end up just making him less fit for the real world.
Federal sentencing reform has generated some opposition among both Democrats and Republicans, but it enjoys much more bipartisan support than opposition. On the Republican side, the strongest opponents up to now have been Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. With Sessions now out of the picture, Trump can seize the political advantage by advancing a mercy agenda that complements his law-and-order philosophy.
If Trump applies pressure, he will find that the numbers are there in Congress to defeat both Cotton’s faction and the Democrats in opposition – specifically, the ones blocking reform because it would hurt their own presidential bids if it passes during Trump’s presidency.
Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Kamala Harris, D-Calif., who are both running for president, came out against criminal justice reform during this session of Congress that just ended. Harris claims now to support reform, but she opposed it as California’s attorney general and even defended unethical behavior by prosecutors who obtained false convictions. Booker, who claims to support reform in principle, seems to be calculating whether its passage will help or harm his presidential campaign.
There is a congressional majority in favor of criminal justice reform. Trump should step forward, work with Democrats of good will, and sign into law a bipartisan bill to reform prisons and sentencing. It’s great politics. And all politics aside, it’s also the right thing to do.
