Daily Archives: 30 May 2017

Disingenuosity

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At the State level, more and more legislatures are succeeding in ceasing to send taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood recently announced the shuttering of four of its 12 Iowa’s clinics in Iowa [sic] after the Hawkeye state’s Republican-led legislature voted earlier this year to cut funding to clinics that performed abortions. Also last week, the health care nonprofit announced it was closing its only clinic in Wyoming and three of its clinics in New Mexico in what it called a “realignment of resources.”

Texas and other States have similarly acted, and Congress is moving to stop transfers of taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood, also.  Of course pro-abortion folks are up in arms about this.  Raegan McDonald-Mosley, Chief Medical Officer at Planned Parenthood Federation of America:

This is hardest on people who already face barriers to accessing health care—especially people of color, young people, people with low to moderate incomes, and people who live in rural areas.

And hold-overs from the Obama administration:

Estimates by the Congressional Budget Office indicate that defunding Planned Parenthood would save roughly $200 million in federal spending while reducing health care for as many as 390,000 people.

These claims are disingenuous at best.  If the reductions or removals of taxpayer money to abortion providers like Planned Parenthood are “hardest on people who already face barriers to accessing health care,” if pending cuts really would “reduc[e] health care for as many as 390,000 people,” it’s only because abortion providers insist on allocating the monies they have away from providing health care to needful women toward providing abortions instead—thereby denying health care to those needful babies as well as to the needful women, pregnant and otherwise.

Organizations like Planned Parenthood really do provide valuable health care services to needful women, and to their families.  They could continue to do so largely unabated if only they’d use the funds they bring in for that instead of for abortions.

Mandatory Minimum Sentencing

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Heather Mac Donald, in an opinion piece in a recent Wall Street Journal argued that Attorney General Jeff Sessions is getting a bad rap over his decision to reinstate emphasis on mandatory minimum sentencing and that those minimum sentencing requirements themselves get a bad rap.  She’s right on both counts.

Sessions is being smeared as being a racist over his decision because most of the criminals impacted are black—never minding that most of the crimes involved are committed by blacks, and against blacks to boot (another part that’s carefully elided by the smearers).  The sentencing guidelines (for that’s all that they are; they are not mandatory, for all that timid trial and appellate judges make them so out of their loathe to sentence based on the actual circumstances out of rank fear that they might get overruled by a higher court) also get a bad rap because Sessions’ decision is aimed at serious and violent crime commissions, not the small fry.  The ones aimed at with Sessions’ ruling are the drug dealers, murderers (acknowledging the considerable overlap between the two), assaulters, home invaders, and the like.  Not at risk from minimum sentencing “requirements” are the non-violent, the petty, the drug users, and so one.

As Mac Donald put it in defense of minimum sentence requirements,

Mandatory minimum sentences are a valuable tool for inducing drug dealers to cooperate with prosecutors in identifying fellow members of large drug-trafficking networks.

One small aside on that: mandatory minimum sentences also are valuable tools by prosecutors for intimidating an unconvicted defendant into plea-bargaining independently of his guilt or innocence.  Both sides of this question are supported only by extensive anecdotes, though, not demonstrated trends.

For all that, say Mac Donald is right on her main point.

But her point is irrelevant.  Mandatory minimum sentences are wrong on their face.  Sentences should be handed up by juries, not by judges or by sentencing checklists in a computer.  If I beat my wife and sell drugs to a friend a few blocks away, I’m committing crimes against our two neighborhoods—mine and my wife’s and that of my friend’s—not against New York City or Washington State, or even my home State of Texas.

My crimes are against the local communities in which my friend and my wife and I live, and I should be sentenced like I’m tried: by a jury of my peers drawn from my community and my friend’s, the communities against which my crimes were committed, i.e., the district wherein the crime shall have been committed.

Sentencing requirements, whether mandatory or guideline, destroy that capacity, they destroy the local community’s ability to decide for itself what is the appropriate punishment to be meted out for any crimes committed against it.