In a wide-ranging
speech to the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network in New York on the 45th anniversary of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. Thursday night, Attorney General Eric Holder had sharp words for some unnamed states that have sought to change the way they allocate their electoral votes in presidential contests and said that sentencing disparities and over-incarceration are a burden on society and have a negative impact on the criminal-justice system.
A number of states with Republican legislatures and governors where the majority of voters nevertheless supported Barack Obama in 2012 want to align at least some of their electoral votes for the candidate from the party that wins in each congressional district. Currently, only Maine and Nebraska do this. The reason for the proposed change? If the GOP-gerrymandered states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida and Virginia had had this system in place last year, it would have shifted as many as 64 electoral college votes, yielding a close victory for Mitt Romney.
Republicans are divided on the matter. Leaders in some red states that voted for Obama have nixed the idea. But in Pennsylvania, it's still alive. Said Holder:
"Recent proposed changes in how electoral votes are apportioned in specific states are blatantly partisan, unfair, divisive, and not worthy of our nation," Holder said. "Let me be clear again: we will not sit by and allow the slow unraveling of an electoral system that so many sacrificed so much to construct."
Holder was not talking about states that have proposed to mandate that their electoral votes go to whichever presidential candidate wins that state's popular vote or with those who have signed onto a multi-state pact called the
National Popular Vote that would require signing states to give their electoral votes to whoever wins the
national popular vote for president. Those proposals would not skew the results away from the popular will the way the Republican district-voting plans would. Please continue reading below the fold to see Holder's views on incarceration.
Holder spent time discussing the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the challenge to it now in the hands of the Supreme Court as well as proposed new federal gun regulations that will be debated in Congress next week.
He also declared that more needs to be done to reduce the level of incarceration in the United States. Citing a litany of statistics—two million currently behind bars, one in 28 children with a parent in prison, one in nine black children with a parent in prison, 60 percent of former inmates rearrested or parole revoked within three years of release—the attorney general discussed the financial, moral, human and other costs to society. "Too many people go to too many prisons for far too long for no good law enforcement reason," he said:
This is why—as we look toward the future—we must promote public safety and deterrence while at the same time ensuring efficiency and fairness. I am concerned by a troubling report released by the United States Sentencing Commission in February, which indicates that—in recent years—black male offenders have received sentences that are nearly 20 percent longer than those imposed on white males convicted of similar crimes. The Department of Justice is determined to continue working alongside Congressional leaders, judges, law enforcement officials, and independent groups—like the American Bar Association—to study the unintended collateral consequences of certain convictions; to address unwarranted sentencing disparities; and—where appropriate—to explore ways to give judges more flexibility in determining certain sentences.
Nowhere did Holder mention what the impact on the criminal justice system would be of a government retreat from the longest-lasting war in its history—the ruinous counterproductive, selective war on drugs.