Why is the death penalty for drug-traffickers controversial?
President Trump is proposing that the death penalty be used for drug-traffickers. Most of the reporting I have seen presents that as a controversial, radical, dictatorial proposal. Here is one example from CNN:
The speech looked to balance the President's controversial calls for the federal government to get tougher on drug crimes with less heated proposals for increased federal funding to combat the opioid epidemic through ad campaigns and health programs. But his call for the death penalty immediately drew condemnation from treatment advocates, law enforcement officials and civil liberty organizations.
Jesselyn McCurdy, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington office, said Trump's proposal was "absurd."
I would think CNN and other supposed journalists point out that the death penalty for drug-traffickers has been on the books since 1988 and was greatly expanded in 1994, when Democrats controlled the government, but they seem to either forget or intentionally ignore the actual laws. As CNN put it:
The law, passed in 1988, imposes a death sentence for murder resulting from large-scale illegal drug dealing. The law was expanded in 1994 to cover dozens more crimes, many of them drug-related or violent.
The 1994 Act greatly expanded crimes where the death penalty could be used, including "[l]arge-scale drug trafficking (i.e.: high-level selling of cocaine)."
Democrats controlled both houses of Congress in 1994, and Bill Clinton passed the expansion of the death penalty law. Fifty-four Democrats voted yes, and two voted no.
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, H.R. 3355, Pub.L. 103–322 is an Act of Congress dealing with crime and law enforcement; it became law in 1994. It is the largest crime bill in the history of the United States and consisted of 356 pages that provided for 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons and $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs, which were designed with significant input from experienced police officers. Sponsored by Representative Jack Brooks of Texas, the bill was originally written by Senator Joe Biden of Delaware and then was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
Essentially, Trump is trying to enforce the laws of the land Congress passed on both drugs and immigration, and somehow the media and other Democrats along with some Republicans call that controversial. It certainly seems to me that when a president follows his oath of office to enforce the laws of the land, it should be considered absolutely correct and not controversial. I guess after eight years of supporting Obama no matter how many times he violated his oath has confused the journalists.
It is always good to point out that Democrats used to support tough laws on immigration. In 1995, in the State of the Union address, Bill Clinton said:
[I]llegal aliens are creating big problems for us, and we're going to put a lot more border patrol people to support us, and we're not going to have people able to work by coming in illegally, and we're going to cut off their welfare benefits, and we're going to deport people in record numbers.
And Democrats cheered!
Here is a small city in Southern California, Los Alamitos, that understands that when elected officials take their oath of office, that also means they promise to follow federal immigration laws that Congress passed. I assume that most of the media won't cover this story because it just doesn't fit the agenda.
Orange County's second-smallest city voted Monday night to exempt itself from California's so-called sanctuary law, which limits cooperation between local agencies and federal immigration authorities.
The Los Alamitos City Council voted 4-1 following more than two hours of heated testimony from residents on both sides of the issue.
President Trump has appointed Joseph E. DiGenova to his legal team. On the Today show this morning, they read DiGenova's quote from 1997, where he said no president is above the law. Don't the talking heads understand the difference between a president being charged for no crime and Bill Clinton, who committed a felony by lying to a Grand Jury under oath?
"Nobody should underestimate the upheaval that a prosecution of the president would cause," he wrote in a March 6, 1997 piece published when independent counsel Kenneth Starr was only investigating financial irregularities in the Whitewater scandal and Clinton's affair with a White House intern had not yet come to light. "But we went through it once before, in Watergate, and survived. The nation, in fact, could conceivably benefit from the indictment of a president. It would teach the valuable civics lesson that no one is above the law."
Isn't it great to have a president who follows the laws that Congress passed on both immigration and drugs and Obama who never cared about the laws that Congress passed because he was smarter than they are so his oath to uphold the laws was meaningless?