As the Dean of the U.S. Congress, I have served under eight Presidents. I can say without qualification that if elected, Hillary Clinton would be the most accomplished, prepared, and experienced of these individuals to take the presidential oath of office.
In addition to her wealth of experience as a lawyer for the Children’s Defense Fund, as the First Lady of Arkansas, the First Lady of the United States, as U.S. Senator and as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has taken progressive and consequential positions on a range of issues that are critical to residents of Michigan. From expanding health care, to protecting and strengthening worker rights, to expanding educational opportunities for all, to safeguarding Social Security and Medicare, to immigration, reproductive choice and voting rights and constructively engaging our allies to protect national security, Secretary Clinton has been there and will be there for all of us.
One of the most important reasons to elect Secretary Clinton as our 45th President is her tireless support and advocacy for criminal justice reform. This is an issue I have been working on with her directly ever since we jointly introduced legislation to prevent racial profiling in 2001.
At present, our criminal justice system results in over incarceration, discrimination, and long-term harm to impacted communities. Over the last 40 years — amid an exponential growth in mandatory minimum drug penalties — the total prison population in the U.S. has grown from 200,000 to more than 2.2 million. At the same time, African Americans are now more than 5 times and Latinos nearly three times more likely to be incarcerated than whites. A wave of police shootings along with ensuing protests have fed off the unfairness of this dysfunctional system to engender further mistrust in minority communities.
As the Chairman and now Ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, I have devoted my career to fighting the discrimination and unfairness in our criminal justice system. I have been able to enact legislation allowing for federal pattern and practice investigations into abusive police tactics, reducing the racial disparities in crack cocaine penalties, easing prison reentry, and requiring data on deaths in custody. I have also spent the last several years working across the aisle with my Republican counterparts on the Judiciary Committee to develop further criminal justice and police accountability reforms.
That is why I know how important it is that Secretary Clinton has pledged to not only work with Congress to overhaul our mandatory minimum sentencing laws, but also provide alternative punishments for low-level offenders, dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline (by providing $2 billion in support of our schools), and end the privatization of prisons.
In addition to urgently needed sentencing reforms, Secretary Clinton also favors taking steps to strengthen the bonds of trust between communities and police, such as by facilitating state-of –the-art law enforcement training, use of force guidelines, and greater use of body cameras. She also supports taking further actions to improve the pathway from prison to home and the workforce, such as by “banning by the box” for ex-offenders. And Secretary Clinton knows how important it is to curb gun violence, by enacting comprehensive background checks, keeping military grade weapons off our streets, and making sure potential terrorists can’t buy guns.
In stark contrast, Donald Trump favors policies that would take us backwards and divide our nation along racial and social lines. He would institute racial profiling as a national policy by bringing back a discredited and unconstitutional regime of stop and frisk. Trump’s policies on gun violence would make it easier for the wrong individuals to buy guns and lead to more, not less violence. Unlike Secretary Clinton, he would mandate that every school in America allow guns in classrooms, he has promised that within his first hour in office he would overturn President Obama’s actions to strengthen criminal background checks, and he opposes background checks for gun sales that take place on-line or at gun shows.
The stakes for our nation and our criminal justice system could hardly be higher in this election, and the differences between the candidates in policies, temperament and experience have never been greater. That is why it is critical that every citizen vote — either early by absentee ballot, or at the polls on Tuesday, November 8. I will proudly be casting my vote for the most qualified presidential candidate in my lifetime — Hillary Clinton.
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