Ed Meese

Conservatives Seeks To Reform Justice System To Lock Up Fewer Criminals

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on December 15, 2010 - 2:33pm

Here is something that you don't see every day: a group of leading conservatives calling for legal reform because we are locking too many people up in prison:

A group of national conservatives led by Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, Russell Keene of the American Conservative Union, and former Attorney General Ed Meese unveiled the“Right On Crime” initiative and website. The group held a conference call this morning to unveil the website.

Texas Public Policy Foundation President Brooke L. Rollins told reporters that Texas saved billions while its crime rate declined 9 percent. Rollins said the project will help cash-strapped state save money while continuing to crack down on violent crime.
Levin added that the Texas crime rate is the lowest since 1993. He also noted that probationers pay dramatically more in restitution to victims than prisoners.

Norquist noted that criminal justice is a legitimate function of government but that conservatives ought to be interested in saving money and performing that function as efficiently as possible. He added that much of the conservative interest in rehabilitation and prison reform started with faith-based organizations.

Chuck Colson with Prison Fellowship Industries and Pat Nolan with the Justice Fellowship are among the supporters of the Right On Crime Initiatives. “As many lives as we could turn around, the system was eating up even more,” said Nolan, explaining why his group has been active in working toward avoiding hyper-technical application of parole violation laws. Nolan emphasized that it’s important to hold the criminal justice system accountable for results, including changed lives. Nolan added that having tough-on-crime conservatives like Meese associated with this effort provides both sides cover to do what they know is right without having to worry about being portrayed as soft-on-crime.

Of course, they aren't doing this because they are a bunch of bleeding-heart liberals, but rather because it is a way to controlling government spending and make the justice system more cost-effective:

Conservatives are known for being tough on crime, but we must also be tough on criminal justice spending. That means demanding more cost-effective approaches that enhance public safety. A clear example is our reliance on prisons, which serve a critical role by incapacitating dangerous offenders and career criminals but are not the solution for every type of offender. And in some instances, they have the unintended consequence of hardening nonviolent, low-risk offenders—making them a greater risk to the public than when they entered.

Applying the following conservative principles to criminal justice policy is vital to achieving a cost-effective system that protects citizens, restores victims, and reforms wrongdoers.

1. As with any government program, the criminal justice system must be transparent and include performance measures that hold it accountable for its results in protecting the public, lowering crime rates, reducing re-offending, collecting victim restitution and conserving taxpayers’ money.

2. Crime victims, along with the public and taxpayers, are among the key “consumers” of the criminal justice system; the victim’s conception of justice, public safety, and the offender’s risk for future criminal conduct should be prioritized when determining an appropriate punishment.

3. The corrections system should emphasize public safety, personal responsibility, work, restitution, community service, and treatment—both in probation and parole, which supervise most offenders, and in prisons.

4. An ideal criminal justice system works to reform amenable offenders who will return to society through harnessing the power of families, charities, faith-based groups, and communities.

5. Because incentives affect human behavior, policies for both offenders and the corrections system must align incentives with our goals of public safety, victim restitution and satisfaction, and cost-effectiveness, thereby moving from a system that grows when it fails to one that rewards results.

6. Criminal law should be reserved for conduct that is either blameworthy or threatens public safety, not wielded to grow government and undermine economic freedom.

These principles are grounded in time-tested conservative truths—constitutionally limited government, transparency, individual liberty, personal responsibility, free enterprise, and the centrality of the family and community. All of these are critical to addressing today’s criminal justice challenges. It is time to apply these principles to the task of delivering a better return on taxpayers’ investments in public safety. Our security, prosperity, and freedom depend on it.

Signatories include Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, Edwin Meese, William J. Bennett, Asa Hutchinson, David Keene, Richard Viguerie, Chuck Colson, Tony Perkins, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, Penny Nance, Ward Connerly, and Viet Dinh.

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Religious Right Tries to Marginalize SPLC

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on December 8, 2010 - 10:16am

The Religious Right continues to react to the Southern Poverty Law Center's updated list of anti-gay hate groups and it is becoming clear that we've gotten to the point where people are speaking out against it without even having read it, which is why we have Ed Meese calling the list "despicable" and insisting that he knows the groups well, so they could not possibly be considered hate groups:

Former Attorney General Edwin Meese says it is “despicable” for the Southern Poverty Law Center to classify the Family Research Council and a dozen other top conservative organizations as “hate groups” similar to the Ku Klux Klan.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” Meese told CNSNews.com about the list published by the SPLC. “I know about seven or eight of those groups. I know the people very well. I know the groups very well, I’ve worked with them over the years, and I think it actually undermines the credibility of the Southern Poverty Law Center to make such a statement.”

Last week, the Southern Policy Law Center announced that it was going to classify the Family Research Council and 12 other organizations as “hate groups” because of their positions on homosexuality.

Among the groups being designated by the SPLC are the American Family Association, Concerned Women for America, the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, Coral Ridge Ministries, Family Research Institute, Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, Illinois Family Institute, Liberty Counsel, MassResistance, National Organization for Marriage and the Traditional Values Coalition.

The SPLC said these organizations will be named to its "hate group" watch list.

But Meese said the Southern Poverty Law Center had cited no evidence whatsoever to show that the FRC or the other major pro-family conservative organizations were hate groups.

First of all, the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, Concerned Women for America, Coral Ridge Ministries, Liberty Counsel, and the National Organization for Marriage were not designated hate groups - they were simply listed among active anti-gay groups.

Secondly, the SPLC laid out the statements and agenda of all the groups included on the list in its report, so the only way Meese could claim they "cited no evidence whatsoever" is if he hadn't bothered to read it.

And then, in one final bit of irony, Maggie Gallagher complained that the goal of the SPLC was to marginalize conservative groups so that no elected or government officials would associate with them ... while Messe demanded that the government have nothing to do with the SPLC:

The liberal law firm informs the media and law enforcement of its “surveillance,” and has close ties to both the media and the Justice Department.

“The question is, can they get away with it? Is it going to become the case that a politician can’t have anything to do with the Family Research Council or they’ll be associating with a ‘hate’ group. Will the media now say ‘We can’t talk to the Family Research Council because they are an extremist hate group?’” Gallagher asked.

...

Meese, meanwhile, called on the Southern Poverty Law Center to apologize and remove the FRC and the other groups from the list. He also said no one in law enforcement should take these latest deisgnations seriously.

“What should happen is, they should rescind their statement and apologize,” Meese said. “If in fact, in any way, they are in collusion with the Justice Department or any other department of the federal government on this, I think it is a serious problem for the government."

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Lessons Are Never Learned

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on November 8, 2010 - 10:58am

Every time the Republicans lose in national elections, we see all sorts of articles about how this signals the end of the Religious Right ... articles which are the followed up some time later with other articles noting the sudden "resurgence" of the Religious Right.

On the flip-side, whenever Republicans win national elections, we see columns like this one from Ed Messe crowing that the conservative movement is now unified and ready to remake America:

The conservative movement won a resounding victory Tuesday. Not only did many conservative candidates win, the American people spoke loudly in their rejection of Big Government policies perpetuated by President Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

Indeed, the American people reminded Washington that we are a center-right country that believes in limited, constitutional government. We now have an opportunity as a movement to unite and lead the country in a new direction that is the shining city on the Hill, which President Ronald Reagan spoke of so often.

...

It is an extraordinary tribute to Americans that, as we face our current crisis virtually adrift without political leadership, ordinary Americans — often through tea parties — have taken the lead in protecting our freedoms. These citizen leaders embody a uniquely American ethos, dating back to the founding.

This is a wonderful development. It brings a massive jolt of energy into the political process. It is crying out for freedom and against any government telling us we must abandon all we hold dear in the name of a false tolerance.

The conservative movement has its voice back.

Of course, the last time Republicans won all we heard about was the singular importance of "values voters" and talk of a permanent Republican majority.

Remind me again of how that all turned out.

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Ed Meese

How Many Coalitions Does The Religious Right Need?

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on October 7, 2009 - 2:02pm

Over the last several months, we've been chronicling the seemingly endless emergence of new Religious Right groups and coalitions.

In recent months we've witnessed the arrival of the American Principles Project and the Faith and Freedom Institute, which was followed by Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition, while Newt Gingrich was unveiling his Renewing American Leadership effort, and Lou Engle was announcing his Call to Action. And then a bunch of Religious Right leaders came together under the banner of the Freedom Federation, but apparently the Freedom Federation wasn't enough because now there is something Conservative Action Project which has been sending out "memos for the [conservative] movement" on a regular basis [PDF]:

The Conservative Action Project, chaired by former Attorney General Edwin Meese, is designed to facilitate conservative leaders working together on behalf of common goals. Participation is extended to leaders of groups representing all major elements of the conservative movement—economic, social and national security.

The Conservative Action Project doesn't seem to have a fixed membership, though the memos usually carry the names of people like Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Gary Bauer of American Values, among others.

To date, the coalition has issued memos demanding that heathcare legislation contain lawsuit reform and doesn't include coverage for abortion, one blasting President Obama for supposedly carrying out an "apology and appeasement tour," one decrying the "culture of corruption," and a new memo "requiring that legislation be available on the Internet for 72 hours before consideration by the House."

This new group seems to have some sort of link to the Center for National Policy, considering that the contact info listed on this memo uses the email address: @cfnpaction.org. The Council for National Policy's URL is cfnp.org, and it has an affiliated c4 known as CNP Action.

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Whither the Four Horsemen?

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on June 18, 2009 - 2:47pm

Back when George W. Bush was seeking confirmation for his Supreme Court nominees, there was a group of right-wing Washington insiders known as the "four horsemen" who were at the center of this effort:

The calls start just after 8 every morning, and the participants phone in from just about anywhere. A lawyer speed dials the teleconference line from a taxi as he dashes to a breakfast meeting. A radio evangelist checks in before heading to Atlanta. An old Reagan hand punches in the password from a hotel room while a federalist movement leader calls from his office near the White House.

The daily conference call, in many ways, is indistinguishable from thousands of others occurring inside Washington's beltway, but with one big difference: This one is shaping the Republicans' nomination strategy for the Supreme Court and, in consultation with the White House, scripting party-line talking points. The daily call is also the glue for a fragile conservative coalition, from the religious right to the business lobby, that's smoothing the way for President Bush's nominee to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

The men, who have been dialing in since 2003, have come to be known as the "Four Horsemen": C. Boyden Gray, Edwin Meese III, Jay Sekulow, and Leonard Leo. Hand-picked by the White House for their ties to disparate conservative groups, they have been instrumental in helping the president name strict constitutionalists to the federal bench--and now they hope to do the same on the nation's highest court. "We've been waiting for this for four years," says Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice. And so the Four Horsemen are galloping into this confirmation fight.

This time around, with a Democrat in the White House and Sonia Sotomayor nominated to the Supreme Court, most of these horsemen have been nowhere to be seen. While Sekulow remains engaged in the process, both Leo and Gray have been relatively absent, though they have spoken out on occasion, while Meese had been seemingly AWOL entirely.

Or so we thought until we saw this:

Ed Meese is at it again.

The Reagan-era attorney general, beloved by conservatives but long reviled by many liberals, is playing an important behind-the-scenes role in coordinating opposition to Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

From his perch at the conservative Heritage Foundation, the 77-year-old Edwin Meese III has been meeting with a network of right-of-center lawyers, buttonholing Republican senators and preaching the same message he’s been delivering since the 1980s: judges should follow the Constitution and not push a liberal agenda from the bench.

“He’s been very influential in his meetings on Capitol Hill and behind-the-scenes working with leading legal lights,’’ said Gary Marx, executive director of the Judicial Confirmation Network, which has been echoing Meese’s message with regular public blasts against Sotomayor.

“All of us feel like we stand on the shoulders of giants who have come before us, and clearly Meese is one of those giants and a conservative icon,’’ Marx added.

Interestingly, we've read lots of coverage about the Right's efforts to coordinate its opposition to Sotomayor but have never even so much as seen Meese's name mentioned very often. Frankly, that is not surprising because presumably the Right doesn't really want its anti-Sotomayor efforts to be too compromised by knowledge that the man who played in central role in nominating Robert Bork to the Supreme Court is now playing a similar role in opposing Sotomayor.

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One Judicial Nominee In, The Battle Has Already Begun

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on March 23, 2009 - 10:26am

Last week we noted how, right out of the gate, one of the Right’s primary talking points in justifying its immediate opposition top President Obama’s first judicial nominee, was that he was a fundraiser for ACORN and that his nomination was “payback” to the organization.

Of course, as it turned out, Hamilton’s “ties” to ACORN consisted entirely of a one-month stint as a canvasser for the organization thirty years ago.

But that hasn’t stopped Hamilton’s supposed ties to ACORN from becoming a central focus on the Right’s mounting opposition, as it is working its way into Fox News’ coverage of his nomination and continues to be cited, with Robert Stacy McCain predicting that it is only a matter of time before the ACORN-obsessed Michelle Malkin learns about it, saying we’re in “gasket-blowing countdown mode [before] Mt. Malkin erupts.”

To her credit, Malkin has yet to take that bait, as far as we can tell, but the same cannot be said for Ed Messe, Tony Perkins, David McIntosh, TK Cribb, and Alfred Regnery, who issued a joint statement opposing Hamilton’s nomination which placed his “ties” to ACORN at top of their list of objections:

Judge Hamilton is committed to an extreme political agenda.

Hamilton is a former ACLU leader who lent his legal skills to the far-left special interest group.

He was a fundraiser for the liberal activist group ACORN, the sponsor of the most comprehensive criminal voter fraud campaign in American history.

It seems pretty clear that Hamilton’s short-lived, age-old ties are going to remain a centerpiece of the Right’s opposition to his nomination – opposition that is becoming nearly universal among right-wing groups who work on the issue, judging by this article on Focus on the Family’s website:

Curt Levey, executive director of the Committee for Justice, called that a bad sign.

"If this was just one extreme liberal among a bunch of moderate picks that would be OK," he said. "The problem is that the administration is touting this as an example of how moderate their picks will be. If this is what the Obama administration considers 'moderate' then I think the nation is in trouble."

Wendy Long, counsel for the Judicial Confirmation Network, agreed Hamilton is no moderate.

"Hamilton appears, from our initial study, to have made rulings that show his willingness to bend the law to reach outcomes that would be favored by the ACLU, which are inconsistent with the proper role of a judge," she said. "If this is an example of what the White House thinks is a 'moderate judge,' I would shudder to think of what they think a 'liberal' judge looks like.

"If (Obama) continues in this vein, I think there will be a political price to pay in 2010."

Ed Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said that people need to understand Obama's agenda.

"It's a radical agenda that would dramatically restrict American citizens' power to self government," he said. "What people need to do is wake up … because if not the courts are going to be transformed in the direction of liberal judicial activism, and the courts will be governing everything in this country."

Hamilton has the support of both of his home-state senators, including Republican Richard Lugar, as well as the support of the president of the local chapter of the Federalist Society, but that apparently doesn’t matter as right-wing judicial activists are committed to waging a battle over judicial nominations, beginning with the very first nominee.

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Who Benefits From the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund?

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on November 25, 2008 - 12:21pm

The Hartford Courant raises some interesting questions about just what the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund - a right-wing Virginia non-profit organization overseen by the likes of Ed Meese, William Bradford Reynolds, and Al Regnery - is doing with the funds it has been raising because it seems like most of it is going to toward fund-raising, salary for its leadership, and to prop up right-wing organizations to which they have ties, like The American Spectator, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the Federalist Society :

Tens of thousands of Americans have contributed to the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund after reading letters like Stephanie Lawlor's. But while those donations total millions every year, the fund spends only pennies on the dollar directly assisting officers facing criminal charges, state and federal filings show.

Over the past five years, the charity collected more than $13 million, primarily through direct-mail pitches. But most of that money — more than $9 million — went right back to the professional fundraisers hired by the nonprofit legal defense fund.

Last year, for example, the group spent 81 cents on fundraising for every dollar collected, according to federal tax forms. After other expenses, the defense fund last year devoted only about 8 cents on the dollar to charitable grants, the tax forms show.

That grant money — about $275,000 — was less than the group's co-founders paid themselves in salary and benefits for the year. David H. Martin, a Washington lawyer who serves as chairman, collected $156,000, while Alfred Regnery, publisher of The American Spectator Magazine, received $81,000 for the part-time job of secretary-treasurer. In addition, the charity paid $54,000 into retirement accounts for Martin and Regnery.

In a telephone interview earlier this month, Martin said the charity is at the mercy of expensive mail solicitations. "It's hard to raise money through direct mail. Why? Because postage is so expensive," he said. "It's just a killer."

Martin said he believed the group's fundraising efficiency had consistently improved in recent years. But federal filings suggest just the opposite, showing the cost of raising money increasing each of the last five years, from about 60 cents in fundraising costs for every dollar raised in 2003, to 81 cents last year.

At the same time, administrative costs have soared, particularly for salaries and rent. For years, the legal defense fund was run out of Martin's law office. But the nonprofit now subleases space at Regnery's financially strapped American Spectator. The initial rent in 2003 was $9,000 a year, but the nonprofit agreed last year to increase its payments to $42,000 a year — about a third of the total rent for the American Spectator's space. Martin said the rent covers a large amount of storage space and offices for himself and a clerk, and he said he thought the rent was fair.

And even as the charity devoted only a small fraction of its budget to grants, not all of the money doled out went to help accused officers. Instead, the charity's executives have sent a sizable and growing amount of cash to a small number of universities and conservative policy groups not mentioned in their fundraising pitches.

The charity's biggest beneficiary last year, for example, was not a police officer, but the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a national campus-based think tank that promotes "limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, the rule of law, market economy, and moral norms."

The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund sent $75,000 to the institute last year, part of at least $360,000 the defense fund has pledged. Regnery, secretary-treasurer of the defense fund, is chairman of the institute's board of trustees. The charity has also given tens of thousands of dollars to the Federalist Society, described by The American Conservative magazine as a "training ground for young conservative lawyers"; to the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University in Virginia, a leading center of conservative and libertarian legal studies; and to a project at McDaniel College — Martin's alma mater.

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Dobson Drama and Prayers for a Political Miracle in 08

Submitted by Peter Montgomery on October 21, 2007 - 12:14pm

The Saturday gala honoring Focus on the Family founder James Dobson started with a hint at the controversy over the announcement of Mitt Romney as the straw poll’s winner. Only the overall results had been announced to attendees earlier in the day. It was at a subsequent news conference that FRC distributed documents making clear that Huckabee won by a large margin among people who voted in person, and in the hours since Huckabee partisans were grumbling. FRC’s Chuck Donovan promised that everyone would get a detailed vote accounting as they left the event.

When Dobson took the stage he claimed that the media had been telling everybody that the pro-family and pro-life movements are dying, and to the media still in attendance, said, “Welcome to the morgue.” Dobson also complained about media reports of a closed-door meeting of conservative religious leaders at which Dobson and more than 40 others pledged that if neither party nominated a pro-life candidate they would vote for a minor party candidate, kicking off weeks of controversy and infighting. Dobson said reports that the group would try to create a third party were wrong, saying he agrees with Gary Bauer that a third-party would be political suicide and would limit the ability to influence the GOP.