Pubdate: Sat, 24 Aug 2013
Source: Reason Magazine (US)
Copyright: 2013 The Reason Foundation
Contact:  http://www.reason.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/359
Author: Brian Doherty

HARPER'S CREDITS RAND PAUL WITH OUTFLANKING OBAMA ON THE LEFT

The bulk of this Harper's piece by Michael Ames is an interview with
the always-interesting Neill Franklin of LEAP (Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition) but it's framed with some nice praise for Sen. Rand Paul
as mandatory minimums are called into question nationally:

Twice now this year, Rand Paul has flanked the Obama Administration
from the left. The first time, when Paul staged a dramatic
thirteen-hour talking filibuster to protest the government's secretive
drone-assassination program, the episode could have been written off
as an opportunistic stunt.

But with his latest move as the tacit leader of the disorganized
libertarian-populist movement, Paul staked out less impeachable
ground: America's cruel, racially biased, and generally nonsensical
drug-sentencing laws.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week that the Justice
Department will ease enforcement of mandatory minimums, the federal
prison sentences that compel judges to lock up even nonviolent and
first-time offenders of some drug laws regardless of the details of
the case. Five, fifteen, and in some cases life sentences were first
made mandatory for drug crimes with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986,
legislation passed amid the hysteria of an urban crack epidemic and
Ronald Reagan's war on drugs.

Aided by such laws, the federal prison population has grown roughly
800 percent since 1980, with nearly half of all inmates held on drug
charges.

The status quo is untenable for reasons fiscal and philosophical, and
Holder's decision was widely heralded as a welcome policy shift.

Not everyone was convinced, though. For reformers who once hoped that
Barack Obama would make a sincere attempt to address the outrages and
immoralities of the war on drugs, Holder's speech smacked of
politicking - a double hedge against the right's libertarian awakening
and the left's charges that the administration has done nothing on the
issue.....

As the policies of libertarian populism come into focus, Rand Paul's
threat to the establishments of both parties will likely increase.

He doesn't have to adopt his father's strident purism - Ron Paul wrote
that drug prohibition of any kind is "incompatible with a free
society" - to push an agenda of sensible reform.

The Democratic Party won't credit him with leading on an issue that
should be theirs, and the G.O.P. establishment still can't decide
whether libertarians pose a path to victory or an existential threat.

But Paul is nimbly pushing his own agenda to the fore. And with
popular opinion about America's drug laws squarely on his side, the
rest of Washington will have little choice but to keep up.
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MAP posted-by: Matt