Obama to Order Release of Fellow Drug Users

Written on Saturday, February 1, 2014 by Tad Cronn


Among President Obama’s plans for usurping the powers of Congress is the releasing of drug offenders.
Deputy Attorney General James Cole told the annual meeting of the New York State Bar Association on Thursday that while Obama expects Congress to pass laws giving judges more sentencing discretion, he will use executive orders to commute the sentences of “low-level” drug offenders.
The president already commuted sentences for eight drug convicts, according to Cole, and the Department of Justice plans to locate more candidates for Obama’s clemency.
“There are more low-level, non-violent drug offenders who remain in prison, and who would likely have received a substantially lower sentence if convicted of precisely the same offenses today. This is not fair, and it harms our criminal justice system,” Cole said.
It is within a president’s powers to grant clemency for all sorts of crimes, but in practice the power is only used on a limited basis. Cole called clemency an “extraordinary remedy that is rarely used.”
However, the DOJ plans to present Obama with what may be a veritable flood of petitions for commuted sentences that federal attorneys will help prepare.
The goal is to reduce the federal prison population, Cole said.
Currently, there are some 216,000 inmates in federal prisons, approximately an 800 percent increase over the last 30 years. The Administration, which has vastly increased the national debt under Obama, is claiming high costs as its motivation for releasing small-time drug users back into society.
“Every dollar we spend at the Department of Justice on prisons — and last year we spent about $6.5 billion on prisons — is a dollar we cannot spend supporting our prosecutors and law enforcement agents in their fight against violent crime, drug cartels, public corruption, financial fraud, human trafficking, and child exploitation, just to mention a few. In other words, if we don’t find a solution to the federal prison population problem, public safety is going to suffer,” Cole said.
That releasing drug offenders before they’ve completed their sentences is planned as a way to somehow help public safety is a little hard to swallow, especially from the Administration that has yet to answer for Fast and Furious, the DOJ operation that gave U.S.-made guns to Mexican drug cartels and led to the death of a Border Patrol officer and dozens of civilians.
President Obama’s sympathies for drug users are well known. He wrote in his autobiographies and has discussed publicly how he spent much of his high school time in a marijuana-induced fog. As a teen, he had a reputation as being such a stoner that he would try to suck the last bit of pot smoke off the roof of his friends’ cars. There are also stories that allege he sold drugs out of a hot dog cart owned by his communist mentor Frank Marshall Davis.
Recently, the president seemed to come out in favor of pot smoking when he said during an interview he thought it was just a bad habit and not as bad as drinking alcohol.
Obama has proclaimed 2014 the “year of action” and said in the State of the Union that he plans to use executive orders to make laws whenever Congress does acquiesce to his demands.
Not only can we expect the de facto monarch to muck around further in the economy (he’s already upped the minimum wage for federal contractors), but we now know he’s going to loosen drug laws, presumably with the ultimate goal of legalizing pot.
There’s a list of policies a mile long that this president has expressed he wants, so it’s only going to get worse as he tests out his new imperial powers.


Read the rest of this Patriot Update article here: http://patriotupdate.com/articles/ob...MCapGe48cbw.99