The title of this post is the headline of this new Washington Post commentary authored by Mark Osler. Here is an excerpt:
As a lifelong Democrat, I found myself in a very unexpected place on Sept. 5, 2018: sitting next to Jared Kushner in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Ivanka Trump was at the other end of the table, and Kim Kardashian West sat across from me. This was not my normal crowd.
Kushner had called the meeting to discuss reform of the broken federal clemency system, which allows the president to shorten a sentence or mitigate a conviction. New York University professor Rachel Barkow and I had been asked to explain what was wrong and how to fix it. It’s a short, sad story: The system for evaluating clemency petitions is mired in the bureaucracy and internal conflicts of the Justice Department. As a result, the mercy intended by the Constitution has been in short supply for three decades.
Barkow and I opened the meeting by laying out the problems and offering a solution: the creation of an independent board to evaluate clemency petitions and make recommendations to the president. There was a quick consensus around the table that change was needed. I felt hopeful, largely because we seemed to have Kushner on our side. He was engaged and motivated; the experience of having a parent incarcerated had given him insight into the broader problems we described. Furthermore, the usual institutional opponent to criminal justice reform in any administration — the Justice Department — was out of the way due to the president’s ongoing dispute with then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions....The Trump administration never did reform the clemency process. Instead of issuing an executive order to create a formal, bipartisan board, Trump chose to assemble a small team of insiders to funnel cases to him. The primary recipients of his pardon power have been his personal friends and some right-wing celebrities. Today more than 13,000 federal clemency petitions sit awaiting action — and Trump pays so little attention to them that he hasn’t even bothered to deny any cases in more than two years.
The First Step Act was not followed by a second or third step, and reform’s fate was sealed when Barr became attorney general. Unlike Sessions, Barr won Trump’s trust, and with that came the return of the Justice Department’s veto power over policy issues. Barr and Trump march to the same “law and order” rhythm — a path inconsistent with any real progressive changes. Of course, Trump has continued to take credit as a criminal justice reformer, long after he stopped reforming anything and headed off in the opposite direction.
Democratic nominee Joe Biden has a political opening here, if he chooses to use it. Back in the 1980s and ’90s he, too, thumped the table for law and order; but he can legitimately claim to have changed his mind and moved away from the dark shadow of senseless retribution and over-incarceration.
More importantly, Biden has a humanity about him that Trump cannot conjure, and that is a plus when the discussion comes to human frailty and punishment in the shadow of George Floyd’s death. Unlike Trump, Biden has the ability to credibly admit his mistakes, commit to implementing specific reforms, and then make those changes once in office. Such honesty, humility and resolve would be a welcome change from the slow, sad slide we have seen since that hopeful day in the Roosevelt Room.
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