As a reaction to the crack epidemic of the 1980s, many
federal drug laws carry strict mandatory sentences. This has stirred unease in Congress
and sparked a bipartisan effort to revise and relax some
of the more draconian laws.
Traditionally — meaning before Barack Obama — that’s how
laws were changed: We have a problem, we hold hearings, we find some new
arrangement ratified by Congress and signed by the president.
That was then. On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder, a liberal in
a hurry, ordered all U.S. attorneys to simply stop charging nonviolent,
non-gang-related drug defendants with crimes that, while fitting the offense,
carry mandatory sentences. Find some lesser, non-triggering charge. How might
you do that? Withhold evidence— for example, the amount
of dope involved.
In other
words, evade the law, by deceiving the court if necessary. “If the companies
that I represent in federal criminal cases” did that, said former deputy
attorney general George Terwilliger, “they could be charged with a felony.”
But such
niceties must not stand in the way of an administration’s agenda. Indeed, the
very next day, it was revealed that the administration had unilaterally waived Obamacare’s cap on a patient’s annual
out-of-pocket expenses — a one-year exemption for selected health insurers that
is nowhere permitted in the law. It was simply decreed by an obscure Labor
Department regulation......To Read More......
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