An encouraging(?) account of prospects for modest criminal justice reforms from the current Congress

The Washington Post has this new small piece about happenings inside the Beltway with this big headline “Is there any chance for criminal justice reform bills? Surprisingly, yes.”  Here is the heart of part of the discussion (with one line highlighted by me for follow-up):

So in this tense partisan atmosphere, is there any chance Congress could consider even modest change to the criminal justice system?

Well, certainly nothing big — or even a bill along the lines of the First Step Act, a law to cut some federal prison sentences that President Donald Trump signed in 2018.  But some lawmakers and outside advocates say there are still opportunities to pass more limited legislation to make the criminal justice system less punitive.

Lawmakers including Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), the committee’s top Republican, introduced a bill last month to eliminate the disparity in federal sentencing for trafficking crack and cocaine.  The bill passed the House on an overwhelming bipartisan vote in 2021 but died in the Senate.

And Reps. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.), David Trone (D-Md.), John Rutherford (R-Fla.) and Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) started a bipartisan task force last month to try to pass legislation to ease the barriers to prisoners reentering society when their sentences are up.  “There’s a ton of Republicans that just want to do the right thing,” Trone said in an interview on Tuesday before he spoke at a reception hosted by the conservative R Street Institute meant to build support for the legislation. “And there’s a minority of Republicans who live on the rhetoric of, ‘Let’s stop everything.’”

It’s too early to say whether any of the bills will pass.  But Jason Pye, who lobbied for the First Step Act while he was vice president of legislative affairs at FreedomWorks, a conservative group, said he thought Republicans could move legislation once House Republicans tire of passing other bills that stand no chance of clearing the Democratic-held Senate.  “As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the few areas where there is not only bipartisan consensus, but support [from across the Republican] conference to do something,” said Pye, who is now director of rule-of-law initiatives at the Due Process Institute.

Especially as we march toward a big election year, I am not sure that House Republicans are likely to ever “tire of passing other bills that stand no chance of clearing the Democratic-held Senate.”  But I am sure that there are a range of (small?) federal criminal justice reform bill that could get to the desk of President Biden if serious folks on both sides of the aisle get seriously committed to actually getting something done.  In addition to the items noted above, for example, I continue to want to believe some form of mens rea reform could be a part of a bipartisan effort to make our fedeeral criminal justice system for fair and effective.