Elena Kagan and the Crack/Powder Sentencing Disparity
Obama's Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan once served as deputy director of President Clinton's Domestic Policy Council, where she served on a working group that argued for delaying critically important sentencing reforms:
The memosâ¦show that Kagan served on a government working group that decided to dial back the Clinton administrationâs efforts to decrease the disparity in sentencing between crimes involving crack and those involving powdered cocaine. A draft report from the group painted the decision as a grudging but realistic one based on a stalemate in Congress over the issue. "Our more nuanced message will not sell as well as the 'tough on crime' opposition message in an age of sound bites," the report read. [Politico]
What an ugly quote and a rare glimpse inside the twisted thought processes that have allowed our worst mistakes to endure for so many shameful years. It's just sickening to think that some of the drug war's most racist policies might have been fixed more than a decade ago if spineless advisors like Kagan hadn't put politics ahead of equal justice.
In purely political terms, they might have been right â sentencing reform took several more years to gain sufficient momentum â but do we want this sort of callous and calculating partisan operative deciding who is and is not protected under the U.S. Constitution?
Update: I edited the post to make it clear that Kagan was part of a group which made this recommendation, and wasn't solely responsible for it herself. A wise colleague pointed out to me that it's possible she didn't even agree with the position of the group. In the context of the Politico story, it's clear she made a lot of politically motivated decisions at that time, but I could be off-base in blaming her personally for recommending this position on the sentencing disparity.