After nearly a decade of trying to pass a criminal justice reform bill, how did Democrats get Republican support for passage of the First Step Act?
Signed into law by President Donald Trump in December, the First Step Act reportedly was the first major overhaul of the nation’s sentencing regime in decades. Well, certainly it was the first significant reform bill passed since 2010 when a Democratic Congress, with a Democratic president led the passage of the Fair Sentencing Act that reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses — a disparity that disproportionately hurt racial minorities.
More ambitious overhaul plans had been stalled in Congress, despite bipartisan support. The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act (SRCA) introduced in 2015 by senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) failed to pass mainly due to opposition from conservative Senators including then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala).
So when Pres. Donald Trump appointed Sessions his attorney general, few people thought there was much hope for passing sentencing reform during Trump’s presidency. However in early 2018, the White House brokered the Prison Reform and Redemption Act, a bipartisan bill aimed at improving conditions in federal prisons. This bill, which was renamed the First Step Act after some modest improvements were added, lacked any meaningful sentencing reform component.
In writing about the benefits of the First Step Act for The Root, Michael Harriot said people should hold off in praising the GOP for reducing sentencing disparities until they understand that the provision that “released these hundreds of Black inmates was not included in the first draft of the First Step Act.”
It did not address the crack vs. cocaine disparity. It didn’t address drug sentencing. It didn’t address sentencing reform at all,” Harriot said.
Because of the bill’s initial lack of any real sentencing reform hundreds of civil rights organizations initially opposed the bill. Nonetheless, the First Step Act passed the House of Representatives by a wide margin of 360 to 59.
The bill finally signed into law was a significantly amended version of what Trump brought forward.
However, a breakthrough occurred in November, when lawmakers and advocates reached a compromise and amended the First Step Act Bill to incorporate four provisions from the SRCA.
“These amendments were only included when dozens of organizations like the Color of Change and the Prison Policy Initiative urged Democratic lawmakers to vote against the bill unless Republicans agreed to include prison and sentencing reform initiatives,” he said.
It still took some political maneuvering to get the amended bill through the Senate, but thanks to Sen. Mitch McConnell – yes, thanks to Mitch McConnell – the bill actually got to the floor for a vote, passed the senate and was forwarded to the president for his signature just before Congress’ Christmas holiday break.
“To be clear, the First Step Act is a win for criminal justice reform. But the Republicans who wrote the law never meant for it to reduce the sentences of hundreds of prisoners. They never intended for it to address the racist war on drugs,” Harriot said.
“Even though some people insist that we must ‘give the president his due,’ the reason hundreds of Black people have been removed from America’s system of mass incarceration is that a Democratic senator wrote a bill, a Democratic president signed it and Democrats forced Donald Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress to make it retroactive,” Harriot said.