When the Washington Post Touts "Criminal Justice Reform"...

......it's time to watch your wallet, literally and otherwise.

The Washington Post has its nine zillionth pro-criminal article out today, titled “Is there any chance for criminal justice reform bills? Surprisingly, yes.”

The Post has sung this same song over and over, always hoping to find a bit of a different tune, and always failing. When the murder rate is headed up, there’s only so much of a head fake you can sell.

Still, let’s take a look.

Several District of Columbia officials will trek to the Hill this morning to answer to the sometimes hostile power that governs the District: Congress. 

D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) and other officials will testify before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee during a hearing on public safety that might seem to come at a low point for bipartisan efforts to make changes to the criminal justice system that seek to balance punishment with the opportunity for redemption.

With the Post, you always need to translate. When it writes, “balance punishment with redemption,” what that means is, “reduce punishment to increase the opportunity for recidivism, which we’ll call ‘redemption’ on the bet that you won’t notice because we’ll stick it on the back pages.”

Republicans ran on being tough on crime in last year’s midterms — a message that helped them retake the House.

Gosh, glad to hear that — in late March. If I recall correctly, what I was hearing in late November was more like, “Republicans’ tough on crime message fell flat, leading to historically low mid-term gains.”

Timing is everything!

And more than 30 Democratic senators voted to strike down the District’s new criminal code this month after Republicans attacked it as being soft on crime at a time when a hard-nosed approach is needed.

Again, let’s bring out our friendly translator: “And more than 30 Democratic senators voted to strike down the District’s new criminal code this month after its proposed reduction in punishment for carjacking and murder, in the teeth of surging carjacking and murder rates, was too embarrassing to swallow, especially since the Senate map for Democrats next year looks daunting.”

“The D.C. Council saw these rising crime trends,” [Republican Committee Chairman James] Comer will say, according to a copy of his opening statement shared with The Early. “But rather than support policies to protect their residents, it did the opposite.”

Yes, there is that. As Chairman Comer correctly implies, “criminal justice reform” in the hands of liberals never means keeping ordinary citizens safer and always means keeping the criminal defense bar happier.

And Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), the top Democrat on the committee, plans to decry Republicans’ refusal to pass gun control legislation, arguing it’s the crime issue that needs attention.

We need to focus on controlling the gun because, you see, it fires itself. The criminal with his finger on the trigger is………..ummmmm……..a victim of racism. Or capitalism. Or class structure. Or something.

“Our GOP colleagues simply throw up their hands, bewail and bemoan the existence of ‘evil’ in the world, as if we were theologians rather than public officials, and say there is nothing, just nothing that we can do to stop criminal gun violence,” Raskin plans to say.

Actually, Republicans, during the Reagan and Bush administrations, did anything but throw up their hands and wail. They passed — at the time with plenty of Democratic support — tough measures like the Sentencing Reform Act, mandatory sentencing guidelines, mandatory minimum sentencing and other actual reforms. As their effect kicked in starting in the early Nineties (and largely supported thereafter by Bill Clinton), something remarkable happened with crime rates. Over the next generation, they fell by half. The murder rate (the great majority of murder being done with guns) fell by more than half, from 9.8 per 100,000 in 1991 to 4.4 in 2014 — the largest drop in murder over the shortest time in American history. The figures are here. Everyone in the field knows them. But according to Raskin, and blandly repeated by the Post, Republicans say, “there is nothing, just nothing that we can do to stop criminal gun violence.”

That of course is central to this whole criminal justice reform debate, and it’s a point-blank lie. Republicans have known and for years have said what we can do to stop violent crime, and have done it, and after doing it, violent crime plummeted. The Post full well knows this. But the Left simply has to pretend that we still need to search for some elusive answer out there somewhere.

So in this tense partisan atmosphere…

I suspect it would be less tense if the Left at least occasionally told the truth.

…is there any chance Congress could consider even modest change to the criminal justice system?…[S]ome lawmakers and outside advocates say there are still opportunities to pass more limited legislation to make the criminal justice system less punitive.

Two things to note here. First, now that we’re a whole bunch of column inches down into the article, the Post feels like it can open up that it’s not about “balancing” anything, it’s a one-way street to “make the criminal justice system less punitive,” i.e., to have less accountability for criminals (which we know from decades of experience means more crime victims). There’s a reason this is not at the top of the story.

Second, as noted above, getting more punitive works. The Left wants to make like the enormous reduction in crime we had only just recently never happened, or if it did happen, the reasons for it are A Great Big Mystery.

Baloney. The reasons are well understood. Some of it was the aging out of crime of the Baby Boom generation and the big increase in private surveillance and security. But getting tougher — longer sentences, more incarceration, more cops and more aggressive policing — played a major role in making us so much safer. The Left knows this but is just too dishonest to say so, because it would drastically undermine their efforts to hoodwink the public about vaguely-described criminals-are-cool “reform.”

Lawmakers including Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), the committee’s top Republican, introduced a bill last month to eliminate the disparity in federal sentencing for trafficking crack and cocaine. The bill passed the House on an overwhelming bipartisan vote in 2021 but died in the Senate.

I had to chuckle because the opening sentence about Durbin and Graham working together reminded me of Paul’s zinger a few years back that the most worrisome Post headline was, “Obama to meet at White House with Olympia Snowe.”

But I digress. The Post is hiding the ball by saying that the bill would just “eliminate the disparity” in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine. How exactly would it do that? The Post puts the details behind the curtain. The answer, you will have guessed, is not to bring the penalties for each more nearly together, but solely to lower crack penalties.

This is because, you see, the lowering of penalties for a dangerous drug is exactly what the country needs “for its safety” after two consecutive years in which, for the first time in our history, America suffered more than 100,000 drug overdose deaths — a critical fact nowhere to be found in the Post’s story.

A few more column inches down:

Some Democrats want more than incremental progress on remaking the criminal justice system, especially after Monday’s school shooting in Nashville that left six dead.

Raskin worked with Republicans as a state senator on legislation including eliminating mandatory minimums in drug sentencing and abolishing the death penalty.

“I’m very open to that,” Raskin said in an interview. “The problem is that we are in the midst of a nationwide gun violence crisis where we are losing tens of thousands of people every year, and we need real action there.”

Raskin’s “thinking” is enough to give non sequiturs a bad name. The question is not whether we need “real action.” The question is what that action should be. The spectacular success of the Reagan/Bush get-tough measures tells us the answer. But instead of building on what we know works, the Democrats and a few (or sometimes more than a few) befuddled Republicans want to go back to, and indeed exacerbate, what we know fails.

I could go on, but the point is already depressingly clear: When it comes to “criminal justice reform,” you can’t believe a single word the Post and its other advocates come out with, including “and” and “the.”