On Wednesday's New Day, during a discussion of President Barack Obama issuing a record number of pardons and commutations before leaving office, CNN commentators Errol Louis and David Gregory both spoke up in defending his actions. Louis even repeated the term "mass incarceration," which in recent years has been commonly used on the left when complaining that too many criminals are in prison.
Before pivoting to the pardons issue, the group had been discussing President Obama's foreign policy and Syria. Co-host Chris Cuomo sympathized with Obama over repeatedly being "criticized" as he recalled:
This has really been something that President Obama has struggled with, Errol. We were just talking about how we got here in Syria with Bobby Ghosh, and that was an example of where the President at first had decided, "All right, you know what, the proof is there. I'm going to take military action."
Congress has been carping that they don't have enough say in military matters. They do have the constitutional purview to declare war. He goes to them, they get squishy on it, and then nothing happens. So it's like when he takes action, he gets criticized, and when he doesn't take action and he defers to Congress, he gets criticized.
Louis agreed and then pivoted to the issue of pardons as being an example of where the CNN commentator seemed befuddled that President Obama would be "criticized" for letting criminals out of jail. Louis:
That's right. Part of the many burdens that lie on the shoulders of any President -- this President, in particular. I mean, to talk for a minute about what he's done with commutations and pardons. He's getting criticized for that. It is such a very small, small percentage of the very large population.
After Cuomo injected, "But it is more than we've seen before," Louis continued:
More than anyone else before, I mean, as I was looking through the numbers, it throws in stark relief how damaging we have been. When you talk about mass incarceration, I mean, what he's getting criticized for, Chris, are things like a 30-year sentence for an old drug offense being reduced to 20 years, you know, a 20-year sentence being reduced to 10 years, Anybody who's spent five minutes in a federal prison or any other prison knows that this is not a picnic, this is soul-crushing. It is expensive. It is demeaning. It is wasteful.
Sympathetic to Obama, he added:
And for him to say, "Look, let's take this person who under modern sentencing would have gotten a quarter of the sentence that they got back in the '80s. Let's bring it in line with where we are now, stop wasting a bunch of money, stop destroying families, and let the guy get off with 20 years instead of 30 years," and people complain about it. It's -- this is why they have that executive power, to try to bring some sanity when, for a lot of different reasons, the system has gone insane.
Gregory then chimed in with his own defense of the pardons:
And, by the way, this is in line with a policy prescription, as Errol says. This is the President taking a view about the onerous nature of mandatory minimum sentences, particularly for drug crimes, and saying, "Let me try to bring some remedy in a policy area." This isn't pardoning some rich donor like Marc Rich, you know, as Bill Clinton did at the end of his term. This is something that is much more in keeping with policy.
