As I’ve been pointing out the last couple of weeks, the Congressional opposition to the revisions of D.C.’s criminal code on the merits is stupid–the tl;dr version is that it has high maximum penalties for many crimes and is not a ‘soft on crime’ bill. Also, the idea that a forty year maximum for carjacking is a deterrent, but a twenty-four year maximum is not a deterrent, especially when one considers that the federally-appointed and -approved judges and prosecutors don’t hand down sentences as long as either twenty-four or forty years for carjacking, is absurd (hell, some of the carjackers probably don’t even know what the criminal code is).

While some of the Democratic opposition is the typical ‘curl up into a ball and punch ourselves in the nuts in the desperate hope Republicans go away’ (hint: it hasn’t worked, e.g., ACORN), what’s worse is many of them probably think keeping carjacking at forty years is a good idea on its merits (such as they are). Many of them were in or around politics twenty or thirty years ago, and we should remember they openly and proudly embraced punitive measures that made no sense (this includes one Joseph P. Biden by the way). They haven’t changed, and they’re not going to change.

See them for who they are and whom they’ve always been.