Melvin Watt: “Mr. Chairman, I wish I could do imitations because if I could, I would imitate former President Reagan when he said…”

“Mr. Chairman, I wish I could do imitations because if I could, I would imitate former President Reagan when he said, ``Here we go again.'' Because we are on this slippery slope and we cannot get off. We keep adding things that make no sense. And with all respect, this makes as much sense as everything else. But the point I want to make is that we should not be doing this in the context of this bill. This bill should not be here. We should be allowing the process that we have set up and have followed for a long, long time to get the politics and irrationality out of sentencing, out of the process. We should be allowing the Sentencing Commission to do exactly what we set up the Sentencing Commission to do. And despite that, here we go again. As President Reagan would say, ``There you go again.'' We are going to add any kind of conceivable thing and the reason we are going to add it is because politicians like politically to be viewed as tough on crime. I do not have any problem with that. But we need to have some rational underlying basis by which we are proceeding, and this bill now does not have that. It did not have it when it first started out, and every time we have added some new violation that triggers this kind of vulnerable mentality, then we have made this more a mockery. We are now doing an injustice, a severe injustice to public policy.”