MANDATORY MINIMUMS A SMOKE SCREEN

The Issue: Congress Defies Supreme Court on Sentencing Rules

Our view: GOP obsession with low-level offenders is unjust and costly.

Lost in the debate over Terri Schiavo and the filibuster - two less harmful
examples of the new GOP judicial obsession - is Congress' latest push to do
an end-around a recent Supreme Court ruling that found the draconian
sentencing guidelines imposed during the crime and drug war hysteria of the
1980s unconstitutional. One of those new creates a stricter definition of
"gang crime," allowing alleged gang defendants to be federally prosecuted.
Another imposes insanely harsh sentences for a variety of low-level drug
crimes, even though alcohol and cigarettes still kill far more people each
year in America - legally.

Both bills have drawn fierce opposition from human rights, religious and
civil rights groups, and are vehemently opposed by the American Bar
Association. But in their zeal to bang the old "tough on crime" drum, the
GOP rages forward, undaunted and oblivious to the obvious hypocrisy.

For example, even as states across the nation, not to mention Great
Britain, Canada and Russia, move toward decriminalization of small amounts
of cannabis, the proposed new law requires anyone convicted in federal
court of passing a joint to someone who ever set foot in drug treatment to
prison for a minimum of five years - 10 years for a second offense.

Meanwhile, the average time served by convicted rapists in America is about
seven years.

What's more, despite its obsession with low-level drug offenders of all
stripes, Congress has done nothing to reverse the sentencing disparity for
possession of crack - a scourge disproportionately found in black
communities. Federal sentences for crack defendants remain far harsher than
those for powder cocaine, a drug of choice favored by white America,
including lawyers and Wall Street types with money to blow.

The Congressional push comes amid news last week of a dramatic shift over
the past decade in U.S. drug policy from the most dangerous substances -
cocaine and heroin - to the least harmful, diverting precious resources
away from the prosecution of violent and white-collar crime.

That has contributed to a U.S. prison population that has swelled to 2.1
million, placing the U.S. far ahead of communist China in putting its
people behind bars. We and USA Today, along with a growing number of
conservatives and liberals alike, agree that all drugs use should be
discouraged by a healthy society. Period. Big-time dealers of heroin,
opiates, cocaine and methamphetamine, should be prosecuted to the full
extent of the law, and users sentenced to treatment.

"But it's a smoke screen to suggest that rising arrest numbers (of
low-level offenders) show the war on drugs is working," writes USA Today,
in a May 17 editorial. "It's time for a serious debate on whether massive
arrests of low-level users are worth the cost or having any benefit."

Ronald Reagan sold the nation on a "drug war" targeting cocaine cartels and
hard drugs in crime-infested inner cities. Now it's a self-perpetuating and
profitable de facto war against the nation's young people - rural, urban
and in between.

No, the real threat to America isn't "judicial activism."

It is the insanity of putting more and more Americans in prison for
low-level drug crimes - leaving millions of broken families, newly
dependent on government handouts, behind.