The Crossed Pond

The Bush administration, anxious to find something that all the Republican nominees for president won’t eventually hate them for, is beginning a new push to rollback recent Supreme Court decisions which put the brakes on mandatory sentencing.

The Bush administration is trying to roll back a Supreme Court decision by pushing legislation that would require prison time for nearly all criminals. [...]

In a speech June 1 to announce the bill, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales urged Congress to reimpose mandatory minimum prison sentences against federal convicts — and not let judges consider such penalties “merely a suggestion.”

Such an overhaul, in part, “will strengthen our hand in fighting criminals who threaten the safety and security of all Americans,” Gonzales said in the speech, delivered three days before the FBI announced a slight national uptick in violent crime during 2006.

Mandatory sentencing, to most people working in criminal justice, is a huge annoyance, to put it mildly. From the federal prison system operating at 150% capacity, to judges who (rightfully) feel it unfairly ties their hands and centralizes a process that is (and should be) inherently case-by-case.

Judges, however, were livid over the proposal to limit their power. “This would require one-size-fits-all justice,” said US District Judge Paul G. Cassell, chairman of the Criminal Law committee of the Judicial Conference, the judicial branch’s policy-making body.

“The vast majority of the public would like the judges to make the individualized decisions needed to make these very difficult sentencing decisions,” Cassell said. “Judges are the ones who look the defendants in the eyes. They hear from the victims. They hear from the prosecutors.”

And, of course, the bulk of the mandatory sentencing guidelines the AG is asking for relates to drug offenses.

This continues in the vein of a conservatism that has become increasingly incoherent on the overarching issue of where decisions are best made. The judicial branch in particular has been demonized and minimized in Republican philosophy, as if it’s the problem in this country. We hear endless prattle about activist, insulated judges, and constant efforts to tie their hands in any way possible (tort reform, mandatory sentencing, attempts to phase out federal parole, etc). The judicial branch is, to be sure, far from perfect, but as a philosophical standard, surely you want it to be able to arbitrate as close to the specific case as possible.

Decentralization is supposedly the great Republican value; instead of bureaucrats in Washington running the country, decisions should be made as close to the individual level as possible. And yet, when it comes to judicial philosophy, the exact opposite seems to be true (where convenient, anyway). Elected national Republican politicians are better able to rule on the case of The State vs Johnny Crackhead than, say, the judge or jury in the case. We want Mitch McConnell and Orrin Hatch telling us what’s up, not the guy sitting on the bench and listening to the evidence and looking the defendant in the eye.