Criminal lawyer Jeralyn Merritt fills in for Eric Alterman at Alterman’s MSNBC weblog and tries to pass off this bit of nonsense about the importance of voting for Democrats in the upcoming election,
I have a legislative wish-list that will be dead in the water if the Republicans get control. HereÂ’s the short version: A moratorium on the death penalty now, abolition in the future. Passage of the Innocence Protection Act
If a Democratic Congress meant a moratorium on the death penalty, I’d go in and vote striaght Democratic on November 5.
But, of course, Congress cannot impose a nationwide moratorium on the death penalty. A moratorium on the federal death penalty perhaps, but Congress does not (and should not) have the authority to create a moratorium on state death penalties (anymore than it could or should be able to force states like Michigan to adopt a death penalty).
More importantly, though, the Democratic Party showed how committed it was to death penalty reform in the early 1990s when for two years the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the Presidency. That was a period when Bill Clinton proposed all sorts of radical actions that backfired in the 1994 House elections, but death penalty reform/abolition was nowhere to be found as an issue.
And it won’t be if the Democrats end up with control of the House and Senate again this year. In fact, I doubt the Democratic Party as a whole wants such legislation to succeed. It is better served politically by having members of very liberal districts introduces such legislation and let it die in committee.
This way candidates in heavily liberal districts can say they’re trying to do something but keep running into obstacles from Republicans, while at the same time the Republicans can’t bash them over the head with the soft-on-crime label. If a Democrat-controlled Congress took up this issue, it would be a tailor-made issue for the Republican president going into the 2004 presidential elections. (I.e., it will never happen).
Source:
The Elections. Jeralyn Merritt, MSNBC.Com, October 18, 2002.