Tag Archives: war on drugs

04.27.17
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Ted Cruz’s “El Chapo Act” Is Peak Ted Cruz

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“Let me tell you about my acrostics”

Here at Shooting Irrelevance, we’ve long held that Ted Cruz is more clever than smart, and more of a short-term tactician than a strategist. He moves in short bursts to get his name in the spotlight, but usually ends up shooting himself in the foot. That might be slightly unfair, as he’s managed to come this far while being spectacularly and almost supernaturally unlikeable, but I think it is still pretty true.

Another long-held belief is that all of his smart things are actually dumb (which is really another aspect of his being more clever than smart), and that cleverness doesn’t always hold up. That said, this is pretty ingenious, at least on the surface. From Real Clear Politics. 

Sen. Ted Cruz joins ‘Fox & Friends’ to discuss his fun plan to pay for the Mexican border wall with money seized from Mexican drug lord ‘El Chapo.’ Apparently, up to $14 billion have been seized from his gang.

The Ensuring Lawful Collection of Hidden Assets to Provide Order (E.L.C.H.A.P.O.) Act would use fund confiscated from drug dealers and traffickers to pay for border security.

“So Mexico would end up paying for the wall,” host Steve Doocy commented. “That’s pure genius on your part!”

“El Chapo led the Sinaloa drug cartel,” Cruz explained. “There is a sense of justice. A sense of, this is what is right, that the people who are violating the border like crazy, we should use their ill-gotten gains to finally build the wall, and to finally ensure we have the assets to secure the border.”

A couple of thoughts on this.

  1. If El Chapo was rich from selling drugs to America, it is because we, as a nation, were voraciously hoovering down his drugs while shoveling him money in exchange for drugs. If we weren’t getting them from El Chapo, it would be someone else.
  2. Arguably (or really inarguably), El Chapo’s biggest victims were Mexicans. The scope of suffering inflicted by the drug gangs is enormous and terrifying. Tens of thousands killed, corruption and murder made institutional. That’s not even counting the disappeared women of Juarez. Even if that wasn’t directly connected to the drug trade, it is part of a society ripped apart by violence.
  3. And again, this was done by Mexicans, to Mexicans, but it was done because America loves drugs. The suffering of Mexico is in so, so many ways an outcome of being neighbors with a rich drug-addicted country.
  4. So maybe we’re not the real victims, and maybe that $14 billion doesn’t belong to us.
  5. And even if it does, it certainly shouldn’t be used to build a wall that is steeped in racism and will do nothing to stop the drug trade (because where there is a market, which America is, drugs will find a way) and will continue to make life harder for el Chapo’s real victims.
  6. So it’s perfect. Like with wall-caused floodings, it is a perfect representation of our imperialistic indifference toward Mexico and our refusal to see them as real people. “Our bottomless appetite for drugs ravaged your country? Well, we’ll take the gains and use them to wall you off. Maybe that’ll teach you a lesson, Mexico.”
  7. That said, it is pretty smart, on one level. Idiots like Doocey love it (and a quick trip around Twitter showed me that people inclined to like the wall were going nuts over it). It is on the surface very satisfying, and even seemingly airtight. People for whom the only objection to the wall was its cost could be persuaded.  Especially if you accept that El Chapo’s money somehow belongs to us.
  8. But, as the arguments above said, I don’t think it does, and more to the point, having a smart way to pay for a dumb idea is still dumb. The objection to the wall wasn’t primarily cost, it was that the wall was an astronomical cost for a terrible and stupid objective. Ted Cruz’s smart plan is still in favor of something incredibly terrible.
  9. Also, it’s just stupid. You know his staffers were high-fiving when they made that acrostic. But it isn’t “Ensuring Lawful Collection”; that’s already ensured. And “Provide Order” is just creepy. And since when do we name bills after bad guys? I don’t think the end of Prohibition was marked by the “Concerning Alcohol: Perhaps nOw aNd thEn Act”
  10. In short, Ted Cruz is more clever than smart.

Honestly, I’m not totally sure Ted Cruz’s game here. I can’t imagine him waiting til 2024 to run for President. There’s no doubt he was rooting for Hillary (only Jason Chaffetz was screwed over more by her loss*), but he was going to run either way. I assumed he was running in 2020 against Hillary or against the fake conservative Donald Trump who hijacked the party.

He’s been a very vocal defender of Trump, supporting and even outflanking his racist cruelty, but I assume he is doing that so he has bona-fides to run against him. “I supported the President but now he betrayed us.” The problem is that no one will believe that, since he famously didn’t endorse Trump at the convention, and because his naked ambition and backstabbery has always been palpable. Again, more clever than smart.

But hot damn, do I look forward to that race!

*Ok, Hillary as well. And literally everyone who isn’t a rich white man. But beside them.

04.11.17
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Sessions Ends Forensic Science Commission; Vows To Increase Wrongful Convictions

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“Science!” -Jeff Sessions, Presumably

Jeff Sessions, Attorney General and acting director of a Confederacy 2.0 Pre-enactment Society, has rarely made it obvious how far backwards he wants to take this country. I mean, it is obvious that in terms of criminal justice (which is to say, the mark of a civilized society), he wants to take it really far backwards. But how far back? And where? Is it 1960 Birmingham? 1840 Mississippi? 1970s New York? King Leopold’s Congo? England at the height of Social Darwinism?

How about all of the above, like a smoothie of racism and authoritarianism. He made it clear over the weekend that he intends to reinvigorate the “War on Drugs” that led to overwhelming incarceration rates, massive violence, and generations of black families torn apart (and which did literally nothing to wean this country off its overwhelming need for intoxicating substances).

This “war” melded domestically with the War on Terror, mingling to create hyper-militarized police forces that saw citizens as the enemy and acted as foreign occupiers. SWAT raids on no-knock warrants became the go-to means for every sheriff who suddenly saw himself a soldier. Tiny counties that see a handful of crimes a month had officers armed for Fallujah. It’s no wonder they stopped seeing themselves as public servants, and started acting like conquering vigilantes. And while rural meth dealers often saw the full weight of this nightmare, it was still directed largely toward minorities, a continuation of America’s historical legacy.

It isn’t universal, of course. Many police departments, especially in big cities, tried to find a way to balance the need for order with the genuine desire for community activism. Dallas was probably the most notable city in this regards, which is what made the murder of its police over the summer doubly tragic.

But the backlash to the killing was more than outrage and sorrow; it was a backlash against the very ideas that the Dallas police tried to represent. In that hot summer filled with racial hatred and mainstreamed revanchism, Donald Trump rose, promising with zero subtlety to take America backward in time. The racial text was crystal clear. And through the revolving cast of advisors, one man stood by him: Jeff Sessions, for whom one foot forward was an abnegation of tradition.

And now Jeff Sessions is using the power granted to him by the slave-state protecting wisdoms of the Electoral College to bring it all back home. His War on Drugs announcement was quickly followed by an announcement that he was ending the attempt to bring criminal justice up to speed with new scientific developments in the hopes of reducing wrongful convictions.

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Monday he is ending an Obama-era partnership with independent scientists that aimed to improve the reliability of forensic science, as longstanding concerns remain about the quality of such evidence in court cases.

The Justice Department will not renew the National Commission on Forensic Science, a panel of judges, defense attorneys, researchers and law enforcement officials that had been advising the attorney general on the use of scientific evidence in the criminal justice process. The department will instead appoint an in-house adviser and create an internal committee to study improvements to forensic analysis, Sessions said.

To be sure, the gussy it up with weasel mouthings, thanking the commission for their service, and saying that the cause of justice will be better-served if it is handled entirely by law enforcement officers. In a vacuum, you could see why that is trouble, since they are geared toward conviction and enforcement (it’s why generals aren’t always strategists). Even progressive law enforcement types lean toward “law and order”, by default.

This isn’t even close to neutral vacuum, though. You think Jeff Sessions’s appointments will skew liberal?

Of course not. The whole point of this is to reverse the progress that was made in overturning fake science and prosecution-friendly standards that led to tens of thousands of wrongful convictions. The commission was recommending changing procedures that allowed for dubious expertise, like bite marks, to serve as evidentiary proof.

The reasons for this are clear. Sessions wants to move us away from any haltering, faltering, and at times bipartisan movements we made toward true justice (the kind practiced by legions of decent cops, judges, DAs and public defenders), and back to the days where you could be convicted for looking funny, pushed on a chain gang because a sheriff doesn’t like you, beaten in black rooms because some mustache thinks you mouthed off.

The War on Drugs was a hideous failure. Jeff Sessions wants not just to bring it back, to  reverse any attempts to mitigate its excesses. And he wants to do this because it wasn’t a failure for the right people. Its cruel impact hurt black families the most, as well as Latino, and poor whites. And that’s exactly the point.

The backlash against progress is contained like a whirlwind in his little petite Grand Wizard frame. This is what November brought. This is justice in the era of Trump.