Category: reason

Here’s everything you need to know from last night’s Democratic debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in just 90 seconds.

Click above to watch or below for more links and text.

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From the moment he was forced to impose a 55-year sentence on a 24-year-old pot dealer in 2004, Paul Cassell has been urging presidential clemency to correct that egregious injustice, which he calls “one of the most troubling [cases] that I ever faced in my five years on the federal bench.” This week the former federal judge, now a University of Utah law professor, tried again, asking President Obama to free Weldon Angelos, a father of three who is now 36 and has served more than 12 years for three half-pound marijuana sales. 

If it had been up to him, Cassell explains in his letter to Obama, Angelos would already be free. But Cassell was constrained by a federal law, 18 USC 924(c), that prescribes mandatory minimum penalties for anyone who “uses or carries a firearm” during a “drug trafficking crime.” The first such offense is punishable by five years in prison, subsequent offenses are punishable by 25 years each, and the sentences must be served consecutively. Angelos was convicted of three counts, based on a gun he allegedly brought with him to two of the pot deals and additional firearms that police found in his home. 

Although he never fired or even brandished a gun, Angelos was punished more severely than people who commit much worse crimes. As Cassell noted at the time, a 55-year prison term is “far in excess of the sentence imposed for such serious crimes as aircraft hijacking, second degree murder, espionage, kidnapping, aggravated assault, and rape.” That very day, Cassell said, he had imposed a sentence less than half as long on a man who beat a 68-year-old woman to death with a log during a drunken dispute. “When the sentence for actual violence inflicted on a victim is dwarfed by a sentence for carrying guns to several drug deals,” Cassell writes in his letter to Obama, “the implicit message to victims is that their pain and suffering counts for less than some abstract ‘war on drugs.'”

If the goal of 18 USC 924(c) is to punish and deter armed recidivists, Cassell notes, the draconian penalty imposed on Angelos makes no sense. But in the 1993 case Deal v. United States, the Supreme Court approved the stacking of gun charges in a single case involving more than one incident. “The Supreme Court’s interpretation has produced a fearsome mandatory minimum statute that is not a true recidivist law,” Cassell writes. “This stacking aspect cannot be justified on grounds that it is sending a message to recidivists who did not learn a lesson, given that a defendant (like Angelos) will not have been convicted and imprisoned in the time between § 924(c) violations.” He notes that the Justice Department’s current policy is not to pursue multiple gun charges in such cases. The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, which Congress is currently considering, would clarify that the enhanced 25-year mandatory minimum applies only to defendants with prior convictions under 18 USC 924(c).

The Justice Department says it is giving priority to commutation petitions from “non-violent, low-level offenders” who have served at least 10 years of a sentence that probably would have been shorter under current law, “do not have a significant criminal history,” have “demonstrated good conduct in prison,” and have no “significant ties to large-scale criminal organizations, gangs or cartels.” Cassell notes that Angelos, a first-time offender when he was sent away for more than half a century, seems to meet all of those criteria. 

“In 2004, when I sentenced Mr. Angelos, I thought his sentence was ‘cruel, unjust, and irrational,'” Cassell concludes. “I am even more firmly convinced of that conclusion today, when the Angelos case has been widely discussed as a clear example of an unduly harsh sentence. Because his appeals have been exhausted, the only solution for Angelos is a Presidential commutation. I urge you to swiftly commute his sentence.”

Obama, who granted only one commutation during his first term, has picked up the pace recently, freeing a total of 184 prisoners so far. With less than a year to go in office, he still has time to free hundreds or even thousands more. If Obama means what he says about unjust punishment, one of them will be Weldon Angelos.

Deadpool is a hard-R take on the Marvel superhero movie, writes Kurt Loder. The picture is dizzyingly scabrous, borderline offensive (all right!), and wonderfully refreshing. In telling the story of Wade Wilson, an ex-Special Forces mercenary transformed by mutant surgery into the mentally unstable Deadpool, the movie exults in blood and brutality and sexy-time interludes of a sort that the Avengers, let’s say, would surely find distasteful. (Although Marvel, which produced the film, is of course in on it all.)

The picture is a long-time-coming bust-out for Ryan Reynolds, who also played Deadpool as a subsidiary character in the 2009 X-Men Origins: Wolverine. But forget that. Reynolds, who pushed for more than a decade to get the picture made, is fearlessly committed to the red-suited nutcase of the comics, and he fuels the movie with a delirious spew of weisenheimer one-liners. (He knows you’re wondering, so he punches through the fourth wall to crack, “Whose balls did I have to fondle to get my own movie?”)

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Steven Greenhut writes about two controversial large-scale infrastructure projects in California that have an estimated tab exceeding $77 billion, the bullet train and the delta tunnel:

A number of legislators are not only asking about the governor’s infrastructure priorities, but proposing ways to redirect scarce resources from these big-ticket items toward the basics. Two prominent Republican officials, Sen. Bob Huff of Diamond Bar, the former minority leader, and Board of Equalization member George Runner of Lancaster, have proposed an initiative that would redirect most of the currently authorized bond proceeds from the rail project toward water storage. It seemed like a political poke in the eye of the governor, but it might get legs as Central Valley rail critics in particular get energized by the idea.

Two Democratic legislators representing Delta-area districts, Assemblywoman Susan Tallamantes Eggman of Stockton and Sen. Lois Wolk of Davis, have introduced legislation that would require California voters to approve in a statewide ballot initiative the tunnel plan. Currently, the governor says no vote of the people or Legislature is necessary to move forward on it.

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Did you hear Marco Rubio had a bad debate? David Harsanyi writes:

Nearly every candidate is a talking-point-spewing automaton. Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz—and even much of what Donald Trump says—is prefabricated, tested and constructed to appeal to whatever subsection of the electorate they hope to entice. The most talented candidates can repeat those lines, jokes and touching anecdotes with the same bogus earnestness every single time. This is their real talent. I mean, even Trump—probably the only top-tier candidate regularly going off script—strings together many of the same absurdities in mind-numbing platitudinous loops, and his fans eat it up.

Still, there’s no question that Rubio failed to deliver on this front last week. And while he’s no more prone to offer calculated responses than is Clinton or Sanders, Rubio let the political world create a caricature.

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Ted Cruz is not the only erstwhile supporter of sentencing reform who seems to have abandoned the cause. Like Cruz, Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) cosponsored the Smarter Sentencing Act, which would allow thousands of drug offenders in federal prison to seek shorter sentences, but now opposes the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act because it would allow thousands of drug offenders in federal prison to seek shorter sentences. This week Perdue joined three other senators in urging their colleagues to vote against the bill. In my latest Forbes column, I analyze their arguments:

Last month Wendell Callahan was charged with using a knife to murder his ex-girlfriend and her two young daughters at their apartment in Columbus, Ohio. Opponents of sentencing reform have latched onto this horrifying crime as an example of what we can expect if Congress approves a bill that would allow the early release of federal prisoners serving time for drug offenses. But the case does not prove what critics of that bill think it does.

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The German government is considering a ban on all cash transactions of more than 5,000 euros. Deputy finance minister Michael Meister says the move is needed to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism. He says the government would like to see a European Union-wide limit on cash transactions but is prepared to act unilaterally.

The two high points of tonight’s Democratic debate—and, as far as I’m concerned, the two high points of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign—came when the moderators raised the topic of foreign policy. Sanders has criticized Hillary Clinton for backing the Iraq war before, but this time he used that as a springboard for larger critique:

Now I think an area in kind of a vague way, or not so vague, where Secretary Clinton and I disagree is the area of regime change. Look, the truth is that a powerful nation like the United States, certainly working with our allies, we can overthrow dictators all over the world.

And God only knows Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator. We could overthrow Assad tomorrow if we wanted to. We got rid of Qaddafi. But the point about foreign policy is not just to know that you can overthrow a terrible dictator, it’s to understand what happens the day after.

And in Libya, for example, the United States, Secretary Clinton, as secretary of state, working with some other countries, did get rid of a terrible dictator named Qaddafi. But what happened is a political vacuum developed. ISIS came in, and now occupies significant territory in Libya, and is now prepared, unless we stop them, to have a terrorist foothold.

But this is nothing new. This has gone on 50 or 60 years where the United States has been involved in overthrowing governments. Mossadegh back in 1953. Nobody knows who Mossadegh was, democratically elected prime minister of Iran. He was overthrown by British and American interests because he threatened oil interests of the British. And as a result of that, the shah of Iran came in, terrible dictator. The result of that, you had the Iranian Revolution coming in, and that is where we are today. Unintended consequences.

So I believe as president I will look very carefully about unintended consequences. I will do everything I can to make certain that the United States and our brave men and women in the military do not get bogged down in perpetual warfare in the Middle East.

Clinton responded first by noting that Sanders has not opposed regime change in every case (which is true, but it doesn’t say a lot about Clinton’s own judgment). And then she moved on to the argument the Clintonites always raise when Sanders cites her support for the Iraq war: “I do not believe a vote in 2002 is a plan to defeat ISIS in 2016.”

That might have been an effective response if Sanders had simply brought up her Iraq vote and left it at that. But of course he hadn’t stopped there. He had put her vote from 2002 in the context of her career-spanning support for an aggressive U.S. foreign policy, reaching up to her recent tenure as secretary of state; and he had put that, in turn, in the larger context of a series of Washington-sponsored regime changes that began before the public had heard of Hillary Clinton. He made a sustained argument both that Clinton’s approach to foreign policy is fundamentally wrong and that it is part of a long tradition of destructive intervention around the globe. And he was essentially right.

The second high point came shortly afterward. After Clinton gave a brief spiel about the decision to send Navy SEALs against Osama bin Laden, Sanders steered the discussion toward something his opponent had said the last time they butted heads onstage:

[I]n this last debate, she talked about getting the approval or the support or the mentoring of Henry Kissinger. Now, I find it rather amazing, because I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country.

I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger. And in fact, Kissinger’s actions in Cambodia, when the United States bombed that country, overthrew Prince Sihanouk, created the instability for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to come in, who then butchered some three million innocent people, one of the worst genocides in the history of the world. So count me in as somebody who will not be listening to Henry Kissinger.

Again it was a sharp attack, both in terms of being basically correct and in terms of laying bare some of Clinton’s core problems on foreign policy. Not all of the exchange that followed was as illuminating as that—Sanders made an argument about Kissinger, the domino theory, and trade with China that wasn’t very coherent. But the key point had been made: Hillary Clinton embraces the praise of a man whose record includes the “secret” bombing of Cambodia, the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam, and the coup that installed Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Bernie Sanders may not be a foreign-policy whiz, but at least he knows better than to seek counsel from that guy.

After the debate, the CNN panel chortled a little over the Kissinger chatter, suggesting that young viewers would have to Google the man to know who the candidates were talking about. And no doubt quite a few of them were in the dark. But then, such voters would have had to Google the guy when Clinton brought him up in the last debate too. If they did, they’d have plenty to think about as they contrasted Sanders’ account of Kissinger’s career with Clinton’s comment that she was “flattered” by the old butcher’s praise.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) promised at tonight’s debate that by the end of his first term he would reduce the U.S. prison population so it was no longer the largest in the world. The promise came during an extended “discussion” of criminal justice reform that was long on identify the problems in the criminal justice system but short on either identifying the causes of the problems or the solutions.

“Today a male African-American baby born today stands a one-in-four chance of ending up in jail. That is beyond unspeakable,” Sanders said—there was a lot of talk about race at the top of this, the last debate before the South Carolina primary. “So what we have to do is the radical reform of a broken criminal justice system.”

But Sanders didn’t really offer any “radical reforms.” He said over-policing in African-American neighborhoods had to end and that there was too much racial disparities in traffic stops, drug arrests, and sentencing. He said the U.S. needed “fundamental police reform” but didn’t identify what it was. Sanders has previously pointed to police departments as an example of “socialist institutions.” When he ran for mayor of Burlington in 1981, Sanders was supported by the city’s police union. He voted for the Clinton 1994 crime bill.

While “radical reforms” are all well and good, they’re not necessary to alleviate some of the worst problems in the criminal justice system. Rolling back the laws that create all the opportunities for police to harass otherwise peaceable residents, especially those from marginalized communities, would go a long way in reducing the harm caused by the criminal justice system. Brian Doherty has explored this in detail, explaining how petty law enforcement traps the poor in a vicious cycle of escalating fines, warrants, and jail time.

When a series of incidents of police violence in New York City—including the death of Eric Garner, who was accused by cops of selling loose untaxed cigarettes—received media attention in the summer of 2014, Mayor Bill De Blasio (D), hailed as a progressive hero after his election, refused to even consider scaling back the kind of petty laws that lead to violent police interactions. Instead, he stood by as the police commissioner explained that submitting to police and complying with their orders by correcting your behavior for them was what “democracy” was all about.  Last year, when police in New York stopped making “unnecessary arrests” and unnecessary traffic stops (like the ones Sanders complained about being racially disparate), de-escalating petty law enforcement in all communities, The New York Times argued such a withdrawal in minority communities constituted a civil rights violation.

The left has consistently avoided taking its share of responsibility for the endemic problem of police violence. Laws about drugs, guns, and other essentially non-violent behavior are pushed by nanny statists. Bernie Sanders may be wrong that police departments are socialist institutions, but they are democratic institutions. While racism is a problem, among police and everywhere else, police act to impose democratically-enacted laws on people.

Force is necessary whenever someone who believes they are free refuses to comply with a law that doesn’t involve actual crime prevention. Reducing police violence will require reducing the opportunities for police to interact with peaceful residents. That, in turn, will require acknowledging that the laws we wish to impose on society involve violence when they’re imposed on the individual level, something Bernie Sanders, for all his rhetoric, continues to miss.