'We’ve actually been working on it for quite a while,' said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn. Criminal justice reform gains bipartisan momentum

As President Barack Obama on Tuesday evening called on Congress to take up criminal justice reform, a bipartisan group on Capitol Hill was putting the final touches on a sentencing overhaul deal to be announced as soon as next week.

Their message to the president: You’re preaching to the choir.


“We’ve actually been working on it for quite a while,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), one of the key negotiators of a package being hashed by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “You may see some legislation here in the next week or so. This is active. … [W]e’re close.”

Obama told a crowd of 3,300 at the NAACP convention in Philadelphia that he’s “feeling more hopeful today” about the prospects of legislation because Republicans and Democrats never agree on anything but “a lot of them agree on this.”

“Republican senators from Utah and Texas are joining Democratic senators from New Jersey and Rhode Island to talk about how Congress can pass meaningful criminal justice reform this year,” Obama said. “We should pass a sentencing reform bill through Congress this year.”

Right now, the prospects for such legislation seem good, given that lawmakers from both parties have been wrangling with a reform bill for months.

Tuesday, for example, the House Oversight Committee became at least the third congressional panel to highlight problems in the justice system, inviting two governors, a handful of senators, House members and experts to discuss a path forward for reducing the number of inmates in federal prisons.

Hours later, the House officially formed the Congressional Criminal Justice and Public Safety Caucus, which will include justice reform supporters. And across the Capitol, Cornyn joined Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I) for a public dialogue that emphasized the importance of reform.

The biggest announcement is just around the corner: Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told POLITICO on Tuesday that his panel is close to announcing a deal on the bipartisan package his panel has been working on for months. Only about four outstanding issues remain, he said, predicting the package will be unveiled before August recess.

He and Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who has his own criminal justice legislation, can be seen on the Senate floor or in the halls discussing final details of the plan, which would let well behaved prisoners to earn time off their sentences while cutting certain nonviolent drug-related mandatory-minimum sentences.

Obama gave a nod to one of their very ideas that will be included in the package, Tuesday: “Another good idea, one with bipartisan support in Congress: Let’s reward prisoners if they complete programs that make them less likely to commit a repeat offense.”

The president has used his bully pulpit to highlight criminal justice reforms before, urging Congress to act and even inviting Republicans to the White House to discuss a path forward.

On Tuesday, former Attorney General Eric Holder echoed the president in a Tweet: “the need is clear. Bipartisan support exists. Congress has to pass a bill this session.”

Whitehouse, another key Democrat in negotiations, however, said any sense of urgency is misplaced and the issue just takes patience — it’s “just a matter of time.”

“Sometimes Congress has to work to get agreement and it can be a little difficult, but when they get it, you can move very fast because of the work that was done pulling things together over a little bit of time,” he said in a brief interview. “We are doing what’s, essentially, the necessary work of engineering. Sometimes, with legislating, you have to go slow in order to go fast.”

Criminal justice reform has become a key priority among rank-and-file lawmakers ever since the Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore riots that followed the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police.

Sentencing is often seen as a racial disparity issue because African-Americans are disproportionately affected by drug-related sentencing requirements. The issue has drawn together unlikely bedfellows, from black lawmakers worried about equality to tea party firebrands who note the explosion of prison populations and the federal tax dollars it drains.

The federal prison population has ballooned to 219,000 — 40 percent over capacity—from 24,000 before the tough-on-crime mentality that dominated the 1980s And the price tag for running the prisons has grown from $970 million to $6.7 billion over the past 30 years, taking up about a quarter of the Justice Department’s budget.

Over the past few months, GOP leadership has discussed the possibility of starting a policing commission, while both Judiciary panels have held hearings on related matters. And on Tuesday, House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) hosted the first of a two-part hearing on criminal justice.

“More than 90 percent of people who go to a federal prison are going to come back out,” Chaffetz said. “We have a duty and an obligation to make some determinations as to how we structure that: Are we sending the right people to prison? Are we doing the right things once they’re there and what are we doing as a nation to reduce the rate of recidivism … to rehabilitate those who are in need of some rehabilitation?”

Chaffetz and Reps. Raúl Labrador (R-Idaho), Cedric Richmond (D-La.) and Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) also announced the criminal justice caucus, “a bipartisan membership organization dedicated to educating the public and Members of Congress on crime mitigation, rehabilitation, community collaboration, reform of the prison system, and the advancement of safety and justice in the United States.”

Across the Hill campus later in the afternoon, the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate and the Coalition for Public Safety hosted a bipartisan conversation on the matter with key Senators.

“We have so over-arrested our society,” Booker, one participant, said. “We’re approaching one in three people who have to check that box on job applications [that they’ve been arrested]. … Our justice system … needs to be about rehabilitation, correction. It needs to be about mercy and justice and empowering people.”

Judiciary staff have been working on the issue for months, as they try to find a compromise between liberals and libertarian-types like Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who want to reduce such sentences across the board, and the more traditional tough-on-crime members of the panel who prefer a more measured approach.

The bill, POLITICO reported, will combine Cornyn and Whitehouse’s bill to let prisoners earn time off their sentences, and parts of Durbin’s, which reduces a number of mandatory minimum sentences.

The outstanding issues, Cornyn and Grassley said, related to which mandatory minimums to reduce. The bill is likely to allow judges to overrule several types of mandatory minimums, essentially voiding them in certain circumstances.

Grassley said funding for body cameras for police officers, another big topic of late, will not be in the package but could be added at a later date.

“Right now we’re not going to make a decision on that until we get sentencing reform done,” he said. “Then we’ll decide on all those other things.”

He also seemed to wave a white flag on his original idea of increasing mandatory minimums for white collar crimes, which he believes would address the equity problem that arises from drug-related mandatory minimums.

“There are some meetings going on today where that would be an issue,” he said. “There are some people willing to negotiate with me but they don’t want any mandatory minimum [increases]. … That’s a tough one for me to get done.”