…is a quote from the 1950 movie All About Eve uttered by Bette Davis. That was 1950, but it could very well be applicable to today’s current situation with Attorney General Jeff Sessions. However…

Let’s put aside all the Russia business and our “beleaguered” AG’s problems with it.

Today on CNN Wolf Blitzer was interviewing Sen. Rand Paul (R, KY). Senator Paul was asked by Wolf what he thought about the possibility that Trump would fire Sessions. Sen. Paul ostensibly demurred and remarked that he didn’t know.

What was remarkable was what followed. Sen. Paul challenged Sessions to reconsider his decisions on these subjects.

Mandatory minimum prison sentences
Search and seizure policy
State marijuana laws

Directives issued by the AG concerning these issues have, in my opinion, slipped in under the radar. They’ve been pretty much overshadowed by the Russia investigations. Directives on the first two items will reverse policy from former AG Eric Holder and President Obama.

The third item in the list threatens states’ rights. The US attorney general is trying to undo the progress made in liberalizing marijuana consumption in the US. This will only lead to more people in jail.

FYI: According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2,220,300 adults were incarcerated in US federal and state prisons, and county jails in 2013 – about 0.91% of adults (1 in 110) in the U.S. resident population. Additionally, 4,751,400 adults in 2013 (1 in 51) were on probation or on parole.

This should be an embarrassment.

Mandatory Minimum Prison Sentences

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is reversing one of the central elements of the Obama administration’s criminal justice reform agenda: a Justice Department policy that led to prosecutors in drug cases often filing charges in a way that avoided triggering mandatory minimum sentences in federal law. Sessions is withdrawing a 2013 directive from Attorney General Eric Holder that instructed federal prosecutors not to specify the amount of drugs involved when charging low-level and nonviolent drug offenders. That policy effectively gave judges discretion to set sentences lower than the mandatory punishments ranging from five years to life in prison federal law dictates when someone is convicted of a crime involving a certain quantity of illegal drugs. –Politico

President Obama came under harsh criticism from the alt-right over the large amount of pardons he issued in the last months of his presidency.

Julie Stewart, founder and chairman of the board of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, which has been fighting for 18 years for clemency for drug offenders sentenced under the tough drug laws of the 1980s and 1990s, said,

“It’s fantastic that the president (Obama) is using his last days in office to continue to grant clemency to deserving prisoners.”

It should be noted that the vast majority of these pardons (from Obama) were issued to non-violent drug offenders. These offenders were imprisoned because of the harsh federal standards for prosecution and minimum sentencing.

– source The Washington Post

Search and seizure policy

Attorney General Jeff Sessions just made it easier for police to seize cash and property from people suspected ─ but not necessarily charged with or convicted ─ of crimes.
He did it by eliminating an Obama administration directive that prevented local law enforcement from circumventing state restrictions on forfeiture of civil assets. The technique was embraced in the early years of the war on drugs, but it has since been linked to civil rights abuses: people losing cash, cars and homes without any proven link to illegal activity; police taking cash in exchange for not locking suspects up; a legal system that makes it hard for victims to get their possessions back.
Two dozen states have made it harder for authorities to take property from suspects without first securing criminal convictions. Three have outlawed it entirely, according to the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit that advocates for reform. – NBC News
A lot of these seizures involved average citizens who were carrying large amounts of cash for legitimate business purposes. Without probable cause, law enforcement seized the money claiming that they were suspected of being drug dealers.
Whatever happened to “innocent until proven guilty.”

State marijuana laws

As threatened back in February, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has plans to aggressively go after states that have legalized both recreational and medical marijuana — the latter despite Sean Spicer’s promise that Trump sees “a big difference” between the two.
After making baseless statements that marijuana is “only slightly less awful” than heroin and that “good people don’t smoke marijuana,” the attorney general, Jeff Sessions – who once “joked” that he thought the violent white supremacists of the KKK were “okay until I found out they smoked pot” – has established a task force to investigate the connection between marijuana and violent crime.
He might learn that legalizing marijuana has actually been shown to reduce violent crime in some instances and leave it unaffected in others. But, in case anyone thought he was waiting for the task force’s findings to come in before acting, in May he wrote a letter to congressional leaders asking them to roll back protections put in place by the previous Congress. These use the power of the purse to keep the Department of Justice from prosecuting medical marijuana in states that have voted to legalize it. – The Guardian

So if you’re thinking, “What has this got to do with me? I don’t use drugs, carry large amounts of cash and don’t smoke marijuana.”

Think about this:

Your tax dollars are paying for the incarceration of 2,220,300 inmates.

Do we need more people in jail? These directives from AG Sessions will do just that! And we are going to pay for it.