Political Quotes

“Mr. President, today I am pleased to introduce, along with a broad bipartisan group of colleagues, a truly landmark piece of legislation. It is the result of months of hard work and thoughtful deliberations. It is the largest criminal justice reform bill in a generation. This bill represents a consensus among my colleagues and me. There are elements of the criminal justice system that we agree can and should be improved. We all agree that statutory mandatory minimum sentences can serve an important role in protecting public safety and bringing justice to crime victims, and this bill will preserve the primary mandatory minimums to keep some certainty and uniformity in Federal sentences and to encourage criminals to cooperate with law enforcement. We even add two new mandatory minimums for crimes involving interstate domestic violence and supplying weapons or other defense materials to prohibited countries or terrorists, but our current system has produced some specific instances of severe and excessive sentences. So we all agree that we need to lower some of the harshest enhanced mandatory minimums, and we all agree that we can do a better job of targeting those enhanced mandatory sentences to the most serious violent and repeat offenders. This bill does just that. It even expands some of those enhanced mandatory minimums to criminals with prior violent felonies and State crimes involving the unlawful use of firearms.…”