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Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Friday that he has directed his federal prosecutors to pursue the most severe penalties possible, including mandatory minimum sentences, in his first step toward a return to the war on drugs of the 1980s and 1990s that resulted in long sentences for many minority defendants and packed U.S. prisons.
[...] In the later years of the Obama administration, a bipartisan consensus emerged on Capitol Hill for sentencing reform legislation, which Sessions opposed and successfully worked to derail.
In a two-page memo to federal prosecutors across the country, Sessions overturned former attorney general Eric H. Holder's sweeping criminal charging policy that instructed his prosecutors to avoid charging certain defendants with offenses that would trigger long mandatory minimum sentences. In its place, Sessions told his more than 5,000 assistant U.S. attorneys to charge defendants with the most serious crimes, carrying the toughest penalties.
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Memorandum on Department Charging and Sentencing Policy - US Department of Justice PDF
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Tuesday May 16 2017, @11:07PM
I'm not a constitutional scholar. However, I did read it. Many times over. And the the Federalist Papers, likewise. And a whole bunch of history. And I've thought about these things at length.
Near as I can tell, what the constitutions says, how that relates to what the framers intended, and what the government actually does are very, very far apart.
Every argument I've ever run into that tries to say otherwise founders on a whole bunch of sophist bullshit pretty early on. Things like "among" being interpreted as "amidst", "shall not infringe" as "yay, let's infringe", "probable cause, oath or affirmation, warrant" as "break in and shoot the dog whenever" and "except within 100 miles of the border" and "unless you're trying to get on an aircraft", etc. And of course the completely made-up stuff such as arose from Marbury vs. Madison.
So there's that.
Not sure I'd want to be a constitutional scholar. It seems to be a path straight to the inability to understand the written word, much less go digging for the contemporaneous meaning of what was written so, you know, the thing could be applied as intended.