Republicans and Democrats Begin to Sharply Diverge on Crime

[Celerity]

This week’s Senate hearings underscored the fragility of a bipartisan alliance that seeks to reduce the impact of America’s vast prison complex.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/us/politics/republicans-democrats-criminal-justice-reform.html


In Gallup’s most recent poll on the subject, 72 percent of Americans said they were dissatisfied with national policies to control or reduce crime.

For the bipartisan group of lawmakers, policy experts and activists who have long desired to overhaul the nation’s criminal justice system, this week’s Supreme Court nomination hearings were ominous. They watched as Republicans pummelled Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson with questions about her time on the United States Sentencing Commission and attacked her sentencing decisions in criminal cases. And they noted how Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican, said the United States was “in the midst of a national violent crime wave” as he accused President Biden of carrying out “a national campaign to make the federal bench systematically softer on crime.”

As our colleague Carl Hulse wrote, “The Jackson hearing seemed to open a new frontier in vilification by focusing so heavily on her sentencing history, meaning any sentences handed down by future nominees will now become fodder for attack.” But there’s more at stake here than the tactics of Supreme Court nomination battles. This week was a pointed demonstration that we may be witnessing the end of an era of widespread agreement that the nation’s approach to crime needs an overhaul.

Conservative support for that project was always fragile and selective, at least at the congressional level. It was propped up artificially by an infusion of cash from certain donors — along with arm-twisting by a Republican president who saw an opportunity to peel Black voters away from Democrats. But now, said Clark Neily, senior vice president for legal studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, “the bloom is off the criminal justice rose for many on the right.”

The backlash



The First Step Act, a modest bill that tweaked the nation’s federal sentencing laws, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2018 and was signed into law by President Donald Trump. Thirty-eight Republican senators voted for it, including a reluctant McConnell. At the time, reformers in both parties envisioned it as only the beginning of a series of major changes to a system widely seen as overburdened and rife with inequity. Instead, with violent crime rising during the coronavirus pandemic, such efforts are presenting a fat political target. Public opinion surveys show an unmistakable trend: 72 percent of Americans said they were dissatisfied with national policies to control or reduce crime in Gallup’s latest poll on the subject, with 42 percent very dissatisfied.

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