President Obama’s meeting with a handful of Republican lawmakers Tuesday was the rare White House gathering that was not just for show.
Buoyed by growing support from some of its most vocal rivals, the White House now sees criminal justice reform as one of the few items on the president’s legislative wish list that could be enacted this year.
Among those joining Democrats at the White House powwow to discuss sentencing reform were Tea Party Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Mike Lee, R-Utah.
They are part of a coalition as diverse as the conservative Koch brothers and the liberal Center for American Progress, joining forces to jumpstart long-stalled efforts to get sentencing reform at the federal level.
Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have also backed the blueprint offered by Lee and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., to change how prisoners are incarcerated for drug offenses.
A bipartisan alliance is pumping new money into such efforts. Koch-funded activists and progressives unveiled the Coalition for Public Safety last week, pledging to spend more than $5 million pushing for criminal justice reform.
“You could count me as optimistic, and it’s because of one reason: conservatives,” said Vikrant Reddy, senior policy analyst at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, home to the influential conservative group Right on Crime, on whether criminal justice reform would happen this year.
“I think for conservatives the first impulse is to be skeptical of government,” he told the Washington Examiner. “Anybody who identifies as a conservative should be skeptical of the criminal justice system. The political dynamic has changed. There is space here to decrease the footprint of government and actually improve public safety.”
For a president who has relied almost exclusively on executive action to enact his agenda of late, the conservative support comes at a most welcome time.
The president’s meeting with the Tea Party lawmakers came after he vetoed legislation authorizing construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, only the third time he has exercised such authority.
The White House insists the president can find areas of mutual interest with Republicans, even as both parties are engaged in a battle over the scope of his executive initiatives.
Obama “does view this as an opportunity for us to find some common ground to move the country forward,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday of sentencing reform.
“There are some Republicans who have raised similar concerns that the president himself has discussed about our criminal justice system, about reforms that could make our system more consistent with our values of fairness and justice and equality,” he added.
Democrats — and a growing number of Republicans — aren’t afraid of being called soft on crime anymore, a political environment fundamentally different from that of their predecessors.
President Bill Clinton had to maintain a constant tough-on-crime tone to deflect Republican attacks, and Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis was depicted as soft on crime in the notorious “Willie Horton” ad by his opponent George H.W. Bush.
Crime rates all over America have plummeted since those days. Team Obama has plenty of political cover to make wide-ranging reforms to the criminal justice system, the White House now argues.
The argument by libertarian-leaning members of the Republican Party is that mandatory minimums lead to overcrowded prisons and bloated budgets.
The federal prison population is now 210,000, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. It was 25,000 in 1980.
And some conservatives see criminal justice reform as a way to make inroads with minority voters typically wary of Republican policy prescriptions.
Republican legislatures in Texas and Georgia, for example, have enacted many of the reforms now being debated at the federal level.
But there are major hurdles to moving legislation through both chambers of Congress.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the gatekeeper for justice reform legislation, doesn’t want mandatory minimums to be reduced.
“The reality is that reductions in federal mandatory minimum sentences are misguided. These sentences are vital in obtaining the cooperation necessary to prosecute leaders in the drug trade,” he wrote in response to a New York Times op-ed this week.
“The so-called Smarter Sentencing Act, sponsored by Senators Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, and Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, would arbitrarily cut in half the mandatory minimum sentences for importing, manufacturing and distributing drugs like heroin, PCP, methamphetamine and cocaine,” he added. “Enacting such a bill during a well-documented heroin epidemic would be irresponsible.”
Also, powerful prison guard and police unions have objected to policies that would slash the number of inmates, a development that could have negative financial consequences for their members.
Though establishment Republicans have been skeptical of the Durbin-Lee legislation, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has pledged to bring “regular order” back to the upper chamber, possibly making it easier to advance such a bill.
Still, conservatives in favor of overhauling mandatory minimums say they need to convince critics in their own party that strict sentencing policies aren’t responsible for the steady decline in violent crimes over the last three decades.
“Only a portion of that decline is related to sentencing policy,” Reddy argued. “The corrections system isn’t correcting somebody if you have a 60 percent recidivism rate.”
