Thread: Steve Hilton: Trump's agenda includes the First Step Act. Do the right thing, Mr. McC

Steve Hilton: Trump's agenda includes the First Step Act. Do the right thing, Mr. McConnell and pass this bill

By Steve Hilton | Fox News
Published 2 hours ago

Steve Hilton: Do the right thing, Mitch McConnell

Put the people over donors and pass President Trump's criminal justice reform bill.

Here's something important our friend Tezlyn Figaro said on last week's edition of our show:

“You have a crime bill right now that Senator Cory Booker is begging for people to get on board [with]. When we talk about mass incarceration – going from 500,000 in 1980 to 2.2 million now. There are American citizens who are locked up right now but yet our concern is for those who are trying to break into America. But it is also important to point out that 97 percent of the people in jail took a plea deal because they did not have adequate representation. It’s a group from the 90s. Hundreds of people were destroyed through Bill Clinton’s crime bill and nothing’s being told about that.”

She's talking about the First Step Act, a historic reform of the criminal justice system that President Trump and his team have worked hard to negotiate. Here's what the president said on November 14:

“Today I'm thrilled to announce my support for this bipartisan bill that will make our communities safer and give former inmates a second chance at life after they have served their time, so important.”

He's right and this is a major populist issue, just as much as immigration or trade.

Let's remember what positive populism is all about: pro-worker, pro-family, pro-community.

Bill Clinton's 1994 crime bill ended up incarcerating millions of working Americans –-far too many of them African-Americans -- for far too long, hurting their ability to work and earn a living, contributing to family breakdown, and helping to tear apart the social fabric in our communities.

Turning that around is a fantastic accomplishment and leaders from all sides are on board.

You've got Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee who has said this:

“This bill would deal with that… It would tell judges that they’ve got discretion to actually be judges. … It will make life better for millions of Americans who, one way or another, are affected by our federal criminal justice system.

You've got South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham:

“What we’re talking about is basically creating a new sentencing system that will give African-American male and Hispanic male detainees a chance to get out of jail… it’s the most important bipartisan piece of legislation in the Congress today.”

You've got Democrats including Senators Dick Durbin and Cory Booker.

You've even got CNN’s Van Jones, of all people. Check out this praise for President Trump:

“On this one, I’ll give him a salute and applause. We’ve got to come together to help the people at the bottom. If you can’t put politics aside to help people who are suffering and struggling in prison when there’s a shot to do something on a bipartisan basis, then I think we’ve taken politics too far.”

You'd think with all that support this bill would easily pass Congress. That's what the bill's sponsor, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley is hoping. Here's his tweet:

“Dealmaker @realdonaldtrump can get a big bipartisan deal done this year on crim justice reform plenty of time to pass first step act in december will gop senators & ldr mcconnell stand in pres trump’s way of achieving major bipartisan victory or join in historic + popular reform?”

And there's the problem. There's one hitch in all this: Mitch!

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell seems to think his only job in life is confirming judges. Of course, that's vital. But so is President Trump's agenda and it would help if the Republican Senate Majority Leader could actually help pass it. But instead, he's blocking it.

He won't bring the First Step Act for a vote because… Well, it's not exactly clear:

“We don't have a whole lot of time left, but the first step is to finalize what proponents are actually for. There have been a lot of different versions floating around. And then we'll whip it and see where the vote count is."

Another objector is outgoing Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker. Here’s what he’s said: “A lot of people like me are still trying to understand what it does...”

He said there had only been a “higher level discussion of whether we should attempt to do it."

Hmmm. A higher level? I think the explanation is on a much lower level -- the one that Washington usually operates on: money.

Blocking this bill would leave more people in jail. Now, who would be most in favor of that?

The prison industry, of course.

And guess who's received more money from private prison companies than any other member of the Senate? That's right, good old Bob Corker. Don't bother wiping the mud off on your way out of the swamp, Senator.

And Mitch McConnell's opposition to this bill, which has mystified many people, makes a little more sense when you discover that he has received - wait for it - over half a million dollars from private prison companies and their financial interests over the years.

Never mind cocaine, Mitch. This is corrupt, Mitch.

Put people first, not donors.

Do the right thing.

Pass this bill!

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/stev...pass-this-bill

Yes, please, please, please pass this bill. What happened in the 90's in Clinton's "Crime" Bill was dead wrong and has been wrong every day since. Please pass the bill and correct this travesty of justice.

Likely Voters: Prison Reform One of the Least Important Issues Facing U.S.

8

The Associated Press15 May 2018Washington, D.C.341

Prison reform is the one the least important issues facing the nation ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, likely voters say.

According to the latest Harvard-Harris polling data, prison reform — which would deliver lighter sentences to convicted criminals and release at least 4,000 convicts from federal prison — is only considered the biggest priority in the country by six percent of likely voters.

Less than ten percent of swing voters say prison reform should be prioritized by Congress and only six percent of Republican voters say the same.

Meanwhile, only five percent of supporters of President Trump says prison reform is the top issue facing the nation. Issues like immigration, national security, job growth, and terrorism are all vastly more important to midterm voters than prison reform.

Though tax cuts remain relatively unimportant to GOP voters and swing voters, even tax reform is more important to likely voters than prison reform.

The polling comes as the Republican establishment — with the help of White House adviser Jared Kushner and the backing of the billionaire pro-mass immigration Koch brothers — has sought to pass a prison reform initiative before the midterm elections in November, as Breitbart News reported.

Koch executives, many of which have close ties to Vice President Mike Pence and Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short, held meetings at the White House with Trump officials and were able to get the administration to push lawmakers to draft legislation pushing their agenda.

A controversial prison reform plan is now coming to fruition in the House, but its fate is unclear in the Senate.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2...es-facing-u-s/

If Trump champions ‘criminal justice reform,’ he betrays crime victims

Daniel Horowitz · October 12, 2018

Font Size A A A

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg | Getty Images

In 1997, Devin Lombardi’s 16-year-old brother, Erik Ingebretsen, was savagely and ruthlessly murdered in Colusa, California, by his childhood friend, Nathan Ramazzini. Through the unimaginable pain of the ordeal and the endless time it took to finally secure justice, Devin and her family at least took solace in the fact that they wouldn’t have to think about Ramazzini again. Justice is supposed to be final. That all changed with the “bipartisan criminal justice reform” movement. With no regard for public safety, law enforcement, or victims, California passed, among a slew of pro-criminal bills, a law reopening sentencing for juvenile murderers like Ramazinni, and Devin will now have to face him at a new hearing on October 23.

You might think this is some fringe agenda confined to left-wing California, but this is, in fact, just a modest part of the “de-incarceration at all costs” agenda being supported in every state by politicians and outside groups of both political parties. And codifying these same provisions that California recently passed on the national level is a top priority of Senate Republicans if they maintain the Senate. They might even pass the sentencing reduction bill or the back-end jailbreak bill in the lame-duck session. Section 208 of the sentencing bill offers a rehearing for juveniles serving more than 20 years in federal prison. By definition, if they are in a federal prison (as opposed to state) for more than 20 years, they are likely MS-13 murderers.

To add Orwellian insult to this injury, Chuck Grassley and other top GOP leaders plan to work with the very Democrat members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who mercilessly vitiated due process with Bret Kavanagh to pass bills letting out juvenile murderers who were convicted with due process and evidence. So much for Democrats being concerned about justice for juvenile crimes.

With much anxiety headed into the re-sentencing hearing, Lombardi reached out to me because almost nobody else in the political system gives a damn about victims. The same Democrats on the committee who said we need to care about the feelings of an alleged victim from 36 years ago with no evidence refuse to exhibit a shred of compassion for victims of crimes that were definitely committed and the perpetrators convicted. Yet rather than calling out their hypocrisy on criminal justice, Republicans plan to reward Senators Durbin, Hirono, Booker, and Harris by passing their bill to unleash hell on victims of violent crime. Both parties just don’t care about victims of real violent crime.

In 2012, Gov. Jerry Brown signed SB9 as part of a series of pro-criminal laws to reopen sentencing for those convicted of life in prison without parole before they were 18. One of the biggest lies of the “prison reform” movement, particularly among pseudo-conservative apologists, is that this is just for the phantom “low-level, nonviolent offender.” They milked the case of Alice Johnson for all it was worth as a poster child for over-incarceration, while they ignored the hundreds of people that likely died from her top-level cocaine trafficking, the biggest case in Tennessee at the time. They ignore the fact that she had numerous opportunities to avoid the mandatories and cooperate with prosecutors. They ignore the fact that most of these drug traffickers commit other violent crimes.

This tactic of putting out home videos from people who are already elderly and sitting in prison is not limited to drug trafficking. Nathan Ramazzini and the political movement behind him are now doing the same thing even for murderers. As I warned before, Nathan Ramazzini is already out with a campaign to say he’s a changed man. This industry is bigger than any of us have realized, and Kim Kardashian West has now gotten Trump to empower it. This will set off a revolution to focus exclusively on criminals in a vacuum without considering the victims, deterrent, rising crime rates, or the spectacular failures of jailbreak.

And what does this do for victims? I can’t imagine the pain, but Devin Lombardi explained to me her feelings ahead of the October 23 hearing, which will likely last a full week:

When we are forced to go through these resentencing hearings and parole board hearings, when we’ve been living under the safety of never having to, we are sucked right back into our trauma. We suffer flashbacks, anxiety, depression, and debilitating triggers that affect how we function every day. I wasn’t prepared as a wife and now mother to be thrown back into the anguish I experienced back in 1997. It’s been a very rough time for my whole family, and we are all suffering because of it. None of us deserve this. We’ve suffered enough.

Devin was just 13 years old at the time of Erik’s murder and was his only sibling. Her parents suffer from depression over the murder and don’t have the energy to deal with seeking justice, so Devin is on her own. There were others involved in the murder, but they were released a long time ago because she lacked the capacity to fight so many battles. “I’m fighting alone an uphill battle; I don’t have the strength or mental capacity to fight the other offenders.”

As hard as it is to cope with the murder of a brother, it’s almost a full-time job to seek justice. Devin is a special education teacher with a two-year-old daughter, but has to find the time to fight this lonely battle so that her daughter can be safe from Nathan and those like him. Because she is not a politically correct victim, she doesn’t have endless funds, lawyers, Hollywood figures, and the media championing her cause. They are all on the other side.

So who is standing with law and order?

---

On the very day of Nathan’s re-sentencing hearing, the Heritage Foundation – yes, THE “conservative” Heritage Foundation – is holding a briefing on promoting the very federal bills that will accomplish the same outcome as in California. One thing proponents will never discuss is how their effort, which is just the lead ship in a massive armada of pro-criminal advocacy, will impact victims. There is something particularly corrupt about retroactively reducing sentencing rather than at least limiting it to new offenders. “We are allowed a victim impact statement through Marcy’s law, but it is just a formality,” said Devin of the resentencing hearing. “It is a very small consolation prize for what we’ve gone through. Not even our justice, the warranted sentences given to our offenders, is ours to keep. One of my brother’s murders received life without the possibility of parole, and now my own government is threatening to take that from us.”

For reasons only Allah knows, Jared Kushner and Chuck Grassley have made jailbreak their priority – yes, their very first policy priority after confirming Kavanaugh. Their prize for confirming Kavanaugh against the onslaught of anti-due process from Senate Judiciary Democrats is to pass their bill on releasing convicted criminals! Kushner has convinced Trump to violate what he campaigned on and support the bill even over the objections of his attorney general. The Bureau of Prisons has warned that this bill will cause chaos and the release of violent criminals, including criminal alien gang members.

There is one thing that the leniency complex hates, and that is sunlight. Whenever the mellifluous-sounding labels like “criminal justice reform” and “prison reform” are stripped down to “early release bills,” the public strongly opposes them. It’s just that nobody realized that this is happening because Trump campaigned on the exact opposite agenda. According to a brand-new poll, voters oppose jailbreak bills by lopsided margins, most prominently suburban families who decide most elections.

At what point will we the people rise up and take back our government from this bipartisan oligarchy that puts the desires of political hacks and C-level Hollywood figures ahead of law enforcement, public safety, and the concerns of crime victims?

https://www.conservativereview.com/n...crime-victims/

It's not a top issue because it doesn't impact very many people. No one has claimed it's a top issue among the electorate, it nevertheless is a very crucial issue correcting a very bad, racist and unjust law from the 90's that wrongfully and unjustly punishes violators of federal laws with a heavy bias (discrimination) against blacks and hispanics. That's why you see Republicans leading the charge. This is the type of issue the Republican Party was founded to fix. Hopefully this group of Republicans led by President Trump can get it done, not because it's popular, but because it's the right thing to do.

Originally Posted by MW

If Trump champions ‘criminal justice reform,’ he betrays crime victims

Daniel Horowitz · October 12, 2018

Font Size A A A

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg | Getty Images

In 1997, Devin Lombardi’s 16-year-old brother, Erik Ingebretsen, was savagely and ruthlessly murdered in Colusa, California, by his childhood friend, Nathan Ramazzini. Through the unimaginable pain of the ordeal and the endless time it took to finally secure justice, Devin and her family at least took solace in the fact that they wouldn’t have to think about Ramazzini again. Justice is supposed to be final. That all changed with the “bipartisan criminal justice reform” movement. With no regard for public safety, law enforcement, or victims, California passed, among a slew of pro-criminal bills, a law reopening sentencing for juvenile murderers like Ramazinni, and Devin will now have to face him at a new hearing on October 23.

You might think this is some fringe agenda confined to left-wing California, but this is, in fact, just a modest part of the “de-incarceration at all costs” agenda being supported in every state by politicians and outside groups of both political parties. And codifying these same provisions that California recently passed on the national level is a top priority of Senate Republicans if they maintain the Senate. They might even pass the sentencing reduction bill or the back-end jailbreak bill in the lame-duck session. Section 208 of the sentencing bill offers a rehearing for juveniles serving more than 20 years in federal prison. By definition, if they are in a federal prison (as opposed to state) for more than 20 years, they are likely MS-13 murderers.

To add Orwellian insult to this injury, Chuck Grassley and other top GOP leaders plan to work with the very Democrat members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who mercilessly vitiated due process with Bret Kavanagh to pass bills letting out juvenile murderers who were convicted with due process and evidence. So much for Democrats being concerned about justice for juvenile crimes.

With much anxiety headed into the re-sentencing hearing, Lombardi reached out to me because almost nobody else in the political system gives a damn about victims. The same Democrats on the committee who said we need to care about the feelings of an alleged victim from 36 years ago with no evidence refuse to exhibit a shred of compassion for victims of crimes that were definitely committed and the perpetrators convicted. Yet rather than calling out their hypocrisy on criminal justice, Republicans plan to reward Senators Durbin, Hirono, Booker, and Harris by passing their bill to unleash hell on victims of violent crime. Both parties just don’t care about victims of real violent crime.

In 2012, Gov. Jerry Brown signed SB9 as part of a series of pro-criminal laws to reopen sentencing for those convicted of life in prison without parole before they were 18. One of the biggest lies of the “prison reform” movement, particularly among pseudo-conservative apologists, is that this is just for the phantom “low-level, nonviolent offender.” They milked the case of Alice Johnson for all it was worth as a poster child for over-incarceration, while they ignored the hundreds of people that likely died from her top-level cocaine trafficking, the biggest case in Tennessee at the time. They ignore the fact that she had numerous opportunities to avoid the mandatories and cooperate with prosecutors. They ignore the fact that most of these drug traffickers commit other violent crimes.

This tactic of putting out home videos from people who are already elderly and sitting in prison is not limited to drug trafficking. Nathan Ramazzini and the political movement behind him are now doing the same thing even for murderers. As I warned before, Nathan Ramazzini is already out with a campaign to say he’s a changed man. This industry is bigger than any of us have realized, and Kim Kardashian West has now gotten Trump to empower it. This will set off a revolution to focus exclusively on criminals in a vacuum without considering the victims, deterrent, rising crime rates, or the spectacular failures of jailbreak.

And what does this do for victims? I can’t imagine the pain, but Devin Lombardi explained to me her feelings ahead of the October 23 hearing, which will likely last a full week:

When we are forced to go through these resentencing hearings and parole board hearings, when we’ve been living under the safety of never having to, we are sucked right back into our trauma. We suffer flashbacks, anxiety, depression, and debilitating triggers that affect how we function every day. I wasn’t prepared as a wife and now mother to be thrown back into the anguish I experienced back in 1997. It’s been a very rough time for my whole family, and we are all suffering because of it. None of us deserve this. We’ve suffered enough.

Devin was just 13 years old at the time of Erik’s murder and was his only sibling. Her parents suffer from depression over the murder and don’t have the energy to deal with seeking justice, so Devin is on her own. There were others involved in the murder, but they were released a long time ago because she lacked the capacity to fight so many battles. “I’m fighting alone an uphill battle; I don’t have the strength or mental capacity to fight the other offenders.”

As hard as it is to cope with the murder of a brother, it’s almost a full-time job to seek justice. Devin is a special education teacher with a two-year-old daughter, but has to find the time to fight this lonely battle so that her daughter can be safe from Nathan and those like him. Because she is not a politically correct victim, she doesn’t have endless funds, lawyers, Hollywood figures, and the media championing her cause. They are all on the other side.

So who is standing with law and order?

---

On the very day of Nathan’s re-sentencing hearing, the Heritage Foundation – yes, THE “conservative” Heritage Foundation – is holding a briefing on promoting the very federal bills that will accomplish the same outcome as in California. One thing proponents will never discuss is how their effort, which is just the lead ship in a massive armada of pro-criminal advocacy, will impact victims. There is something particularly corrupt about retroactively reducing sentencing rather than at least limiting it to new offenders. “We are allowed a victim impact statement through Marcy’s law, but it is just a formality,” said Devin of the resentencing hearing. “It is a very small consolation prize for what we’ve gone through. Not even our justice, the warranted sentences given to our offenders, is ours to keep. One of my brother’s murders received life without the possibility of parole, and now my own government is threatening to take that from us.”

For reasons only Allah knows, Jared Kushner and Chuck Grassley have made jailbreak their priority – yes, their very first policy priority after confirming Kavanaugh. Their prize for confirming Kavanaugh against the onslaught of anti-due process from Senate Judiciary Democrats is to pass their bill on releasing convicted criminals! Kushner has convinced Trump to violate what he campaigned on and support the bill even over the objections of his attorney general. The Bureau of Prisons has warned that this bill will cause chaos and the release of violent criminals, including criminal alien gang members.

There is one thing that the leniency complex hates, and that is sunlight. Whenever the mellifluous-sounding labels like “criminal justice reform” and “prison reform” are stripped down to “early release bills,” the public strongly opposes them. It’s just that nobody realized that this is happening because Trump campaigned on the exact opposite agenda. According to a brand-new poll, voters oppose jailbreak bills by lopsided margins, most prominently suburban families who decide most elections.

At what point will we the people rise up and take back our government from this bipartisan oligarchy that puts the desires of political hacks and C-level Hollywood figures ahead of law enforcement, public safety, and the concerns of crime victims?

https://www.conservativereview.com/n...crime-victims/

It's sad when people can't keep the oranges in their crates and the apples in their baskets.

Those are state crimes and issues and have absolutely NOTHING to do with the federal prison reform bill which only impacts non-violent federal offenses. This bill is a Republican effort with some support from DemoQuacks that has been long worked on and is long needed to correct a terrible, racist DemoQuack bill from the 90's that was pushed and signed into law by Bill Clinton.

Since when do people who claim to be Republicans fight for injustice instead of against it, especially when the injustice targets black Americans? The Republican Party was formed to protect black Americans, not target them for plea deal prosecutions by the federal government to fill private prisons for profit at taxpayer expense. Your position on the bill is not Republican, Daniel, so you're in the wrong boat on this one.

Yes, the House-passed jailbreak bill releases criminal aliens from prison



Daniel Horowitz · June 5, 2018

Font Size A A A

Prison cell in Alcatraz. Dave Nakayama | Flickr


Something funny happens when you actually take time to analyze a gravely transformative piece of legislation. It’s something that not a single member of the House who voted for the aptly named First Step Act got a chance to do: You understand the consequences of the bill.


Proponents of the bill, many of whom are pro-illegal alien to begin with, defensively insist that because deportable aliens (both illegal immigrants and criminal legal immigrants) are not eligible for good time credits, they will not be among those released into home confinement or let out early under the provisions of this bill. The problem is that Section 402, which is extremely dangerous as it pertains to the entire prison population, will mandate that the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) release a number of criminal aliens into home confinement at some point. This is what happens when no section-by-section summary of the bill is released, no hearings are held, and no amendments are made eligible.


Under current law, the Bureau of Prisons may release a prisoner into home confinement for the final six months or 10 percent of the sentence (whichever is less). Section 402 of the First Step Act mandates that BOPshall release anyone “with lower risk levels and lower needs on home confinement” for that period of time. The bill never defines “lower” risk, which to begin with is subjective, and which to proponents of this bill includes everyone convicted of drug trafficking and firearms violations. Even the early time credits portion of the bill still applies to armed robbers as long as they were never convicted for any death resulting from that robbery.


Therefore, it’s quite evident that any attorney general not named Jeff Sessions will deem tens of thousands of hardened heroin traffickers (who were often arrested for murder or robbery but were never convicted) as “lower risk” (notice how they are designated as “lower” and not “low” risk). But it’s worse than that. Some will say that a number of criminals, especially criminal aliens, just will not be designated at all. Well, the attorney general must issue some sort of assessment over all 180,000 prisoners within six months. This provision of the bill in itself is ludicrous, unfeasible, and wastes DOJ resources, but nonetheless it requires the DOJ to make a risk assessment for everyone, including illegal aliens. You can only imagine the one-directional pressure and scrutiny from the dozens of jailbreak groups demanding the loosest interpretation of risk assessment as possible.


The provision of the bill releasing tens of thousands of violent criminals into home confinement is bad enough for non-illegal aliens. As Thomas Ascik, a career prosecutor in North Carolina, warned, “ABC documented 50 cases nationwide of murders committed by prisoners who were supposed to be confined to home with ankle bracelets.” Home confinement is a joke, and this bill does not put the necessary resources into making it secure precisely because proponents want the talking point of saving money. But home confinement, as they well know, is even more costly than incarceration if done right. You can imagine the hardened criminals who will now be out under such a tenuous arrangement.


In my home county, a juvenile under home confinement went out and murdered a cop last month. Often, those on home detention commit violent crimes. Last year, one high-profile criminal was finally caught after 25 years of committing crime since being released into a halfway house. Without any statutory definition of “lower level,” it is simply legislative malpractice for anyone to vote for section 402 of this bill.


This brings us back to immigration. Under current law, home confinement at the end of the prison sentence is elective, so the BOP has elected not to make deportable aliens eligible for this arrangement because they are an obvious flight risk. Thus, at the end of their sentences, the U.S. marshals transfer them over to ICE custody for deportation proceedings.


Under the proposed law, on the other hand, the BOP must release anyone designated as “lower level” risk into home confinement. This part of the bill, unlike the time credits for “recidivism” programs, made no exceptions for deportable aliens. Such a provision was in the original bill but was removed. Members of Congress didn’t bother reading either version of the bill. The original bill required the DOJ to transfer any deportable over to ICE, and that would have covered those released under section 402. Without that provision, there is nothing stopping the release of illegals under the “lower level risk” provision.


We already know that these same advocacy groups on the Left and the phony Right view both drug trafficking and immigration crimes as “lower level.” They are quite passionate about that. This means that a goodly number of criminal aliens in prison would easily be deemed lower level. Again, that would be an inconsequential distinction if they were to be immediately transferred to ICE and deported. But once they are let into home confinement, raise your hands if you think they will ever wind up being deported.


Consider the killer of Kate Steinle, Jose Garcia Zarate. He was acquitted on state murder and manslaughter charges, but the feds are prosecuting him for gun laws and re-entry. Both these crimes are deemed as low-level by proponents of jailbreak, even though we know he murdered Kate Steinle.


This is the big lie about the nature of those in federal prison. Aside from a large contingent of foreign nationals who should be deported, the federal population includes many career criminals. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, 72.8 percent of federal offenders sentenced in fiscal year 2016 had been convicted for prior offenses, at an average rate of 6.1 crimes per criminal. Many of them have been arrested for or even convicted of violent crimes in the state system. Garcia Zarate is the quintessential profile of a federal prisoner.


Sadly, the entire jailbreak effort is built upon a lie. Proponents won’t even admit that illegal aliens are being released by this bill after they purposely removed a section of the bill blocking it.


https://www.conservativereview.com/n...s-from-prison/

Zarate was convicted of the gun possession charge in California and served time for it under California law. The federal case for the same act is on hold pending the US Supreme Court Ruling on another similar case involving gun possession whereby the defendant is claiming double jeopardy. In my opinion, it is double jeopardy and unconstitutional. We'll see what the Supreme Court thinks of it in a few months. If they agree, then the only federal charge against Zarate is illegal re-entry.

Aliens including legal immigrants and illegal aliens represent 20% of federal prisoners. They are not the focus of this prison reform bill, the other 80% who are American Citizens are the focus of this reform bill, the vast majority of them black Americans. I hope people will stop using illegal aliens to justify discrimination against black Americans.