We are always told of the importance of "reaching across the aisle" and "working bipartisanly," at least when it comes to bills Democrats want passed.  Well, once again Republicans are only too glad to help when it comes to releasing "low level" drug dealers and addicts from jail, soon to burglarize a home near you to feed their addiction, no doubt.

In June, Representatives Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and Bobby Scott (D-VA) introduced the most ambitious criminal-justice reform bill Congress had seen in years.

An ambitious reform?  We don't know what this bill is yet, but can you figure out if Politico is for or against it?

The bill, called the SAFE Justice Act ...

Who says Republicans don't know how to market themselves?  They're proposing a bill that has the word "safe" in its name!  That sounds as though it will make us safer!

... bundles together a lot of relatively small reforms into a package that could reduce the federal prison population significantly.

Note the obtuse way this is written.  Even the hacks at Politico know that people aren't in favor of releasing criminals from jail, so they call it "reducing the prison population."  For all we know, it could be through a massive retroactive expansion of the death penalty.

It's built on recent criminal-justice reforms taken at the state level, as dozens of states have cut prison sentences and adopted "data-driven" rehabilitation policies.

Data-driven!  Sounds scientific!  Do you think there must be some book or how-to guide to propaganda-writing that these leftist journalists must have read?

The House's solution, via the SAFE Justice Act, isn't to reduce the mandatory minimums themselves — but to narrow the range of people who they apply to. Instead of someone who's convicted of trafficking a certain amount of cocaine being automatically sentenced to 10 years, for example, he'd only trigger the 10-year minimum if he were also a leader or organizer of an organization of five or more people. And even then, the bill says that judges can override the mandatory minimum if the defendant doesn't have much of a criminal history, or has a serious drug problem.

So if someone sold a "certain amount" of cocaine to school kids, but had only four people in his organization, he would no longer be subject to mandatory minimums for prison.  This is called progress?

The bill would also make it possible for more people to be sentenced to probation instead of getting sent to prison. It would allow drug offenders to get probation if they'd been convicted of low-level drug crimes before.

This is insane – giving probation to a repeat offender?  Who thinks like this?

My favorite sentence in the whole article:

Prisoners could get 33 percent off their prison terms for participating in programming[.]

No, unfortunately they are not talking about programming them like robots.  If prisoners "participate" in prison "education programs," they can get about a third off their sentences.  This is a serious weakening of sentencing laws.  If a crime carries ten years, you don't want convicts out in seven, all because they participated in some phony prison program.

This is all part of a movement to decriminalize not only the usage of narcotics, but the trafficking of narcotics as well.  There is no such thing as a "low level" of drug dealing when you're talking about a drug that can kill people.  Just because they are not firing a loaded pistol doesn't mean they aren't doing tremendous harm to society.  And addicts need to get the money from somewhere, which feeds into burglaries and theft.

Republican congressman Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin is pushing this bill, and Boehner has promised a vote on the House floor.  This is why we elected a Republican Congress?

This article was produced by NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.