Lee, Leahy Comment On House Passage of the Bipartisan Email Privacy Act
“Today’s 419-0 House vote for the Email Privacy Act is an historic step toward updating our privacy laws for the digital age. It should go without saying that law enforcement agents should have to get a warrant to read Americans’ emails or retrieve their sensitive information from the cloud – yet that is not what our statutes currently require. It is long past time to reassure the American people that their online communications are protected from warrantless searches. The Email Privacy Act does just that. As today’s House vote shows, it is that rare bill that garners support from the full range of the political spectrum, and that can become law even in an election year. The companion bill that we introduced in the Senate last year has broad support with more than 25 cosponsors, including senior members from both parties. Now that the House has passed this bill by a vote of 419-0, it’s time for the Senate act. We urge the Senate to take up and pass this bipartisan, common-sense legislation without delay.”
Conn Carroll (Lee)
Jessica Brady (Leahy)
Jessica_Brady@Judiciary-dem.senate.gov
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Senators to Provide Update on Criminal Justice Reform
WASHINGTON—TODAY at 1:45 p.m. EDT, a bipartisan group of Senators will announce new provisions and new cosponsors to the comprehensive Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act in the Senate Radio-TV Gallery. The bill is a product of more than a year of negotiations and passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 22, by a strong bipartisan vote of 15-5.
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Sentencing Reform & Corrections Act Expands Bipartisan Support
WASHINGTON – The bipartisan authors of the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act (S. 2123) today announced revisions to the legislation to broaden bipartisan support for criminal justice reform. The bill is led by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, Assistant Democratic Leader Dick Durbin, Assistant Majority Leader John Cornyn, Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Patrick Leahy, and Senators Mike Lee and Sheldon Whitehouse.
The revised bill is now cosponsored by a bipartisan group of 37 senators and supported by a broad and diverse array of organizations and interests. In a recent letter of support from the National District Attorneys Association, the largest association of prosecutors in the country, the organization’s president wrote, “As a result of months of changes and good faith negotiations, our organization feels the latest version of the bill strikes the appropriate balance between targeting the highest level drug traffickers plaguing our communities, while simultaneously decreasing crime rates and addressing the burgeoning prison population.” The bill enjoys support from coalitions representing more than 400 groups and organizations across the political spectrum.
The revised legislation leaves intact important tools to help prosecutors take down large criminal operations, and still reduces minimum penalties for low-level, non-violent offenders. The bill still expands the existing safety-valve provision and creates a second safety-valve so that judges are able to exercise greater discretion in sentencing for low-level, non-violent drug traffickers. And the bill maintains two new mandatory minimums for offenses involving interstate domestic violence and providing weapons to prohibited countries or designated terrorists. Importantly, the revised bill also leaves in place important prison reforms that encourage qualifying inmates to earn reduced sentences through recidivism reduction programs.
After seeking input from Senate colleagues, the authors fine-tuned some provisions to ensure violent criminals do not benefit from reduced sentence opportunities established by the bill. It now expressly excludes offenders convicted of any serious violent felony from retroactive early release. It also substantially limits the changes to the firearm provisions, striking all changes to the Armed Career Criminal Act. The revised bill also establishes a mandatory sentencing enhancement for offenses involving fentanyl, a dangerous opioid responsible for thousands of drug overdoses and deaths.
The revised bill also provides greater opportunity for relief for low-level, non-violent drug offenders. Prior misdemeanors and other minor drug offenses are excluded from an offender’s criminal history calculation for purposes of the safety valve. The bill makes clear that minor, non-violent participants in large drug conspiracies can be eligible for relief under the “second safety valve.” And a defendant who cooperates with law enforcement may not be subject to an enhanced sentence unless the defendant was involved in any acts of violence. Finally, outdated, non-violent narcotics convictions cannot serve as predicate offenses for the enhanced mandatory minimum for repeat offenders.
The bill’s authors released the following statements:
“After nearly a year of bipartisan collaboration, we developed a comprehensive plan that goes a long way to address over-incarceration, reduce recidivism, and save taxpayer dollars, all while preserving tools to keep violent and career criminals out of our communities. We’ve taken that same proven strategy of good-faith negotiations to our Senate colleagues to fine tune and improve this proposal. In doing so, the bill has gained even broader bipartisan support. I’m grateful for the work of the other authors and all of my colleagues for their willingness to come together on a historic bill worth of consideration by the full Senate,” Grassley said.
“This legislation represents more than three years of work on criminal justice reform, and months of bipartisan negotiations with my colleagues. We believe this bill can pass the Senate with a majority of Democrats and majority of Republicans supporting it. The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country on earth. Mandatory minimum sentences were once seen as a strong deterrent. In reality they have too often been unfair, fiscally irresponsible and a threat to public safety. Given tight budgets and overcrowded prison cells, our country must reform these outdated and ineffective laws that have cost American taxpayers billions of dollars. This is the best chance in a generation to reform our federal drug sentencing laws. We cannot squander it,” Durbin said.
“By preserving and expanding important mandatory minimums for violent offenders while preparing low-level inmates to reenter society and break the cycle of recidivism, this legislation builds on reforms in states like Texas that have successfully rehabilitated prisoners, reduced crime rates, and saved taxpayer dollars. I look forward to working with my colleagues as we continue to build support for this commonsense measure on both sides of the aisle,” Cornyn Said.
“It has taken a long time, but I am glad that a bipartisan group of Senators has joined our efforts to improve the fairness of our criminal justice system. Now, the Senate must vote. The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act has the support of a majority of Senators, and it is an important first step in correcting the costly mistakes we made when we enacted reactionary mandatory minimums sentences. Real people, like Weldon Angelos, are paying with decades of their lives. We must keep pushing and see that this bill is enacted and continue working toward additional reforms,” Leahy said.
“To be effective, a criminal justice system must be seen as legitimate. And for too long our federal sentencing laws have required punishments that just don’t fit the crime. More and more of our fellow senators are recognizing this mismatch between crimes and penalties and this bill takes a big step in fixing the problem. I am grateful for the feedback we have received from our colleagues on this bill, and I believe it is a better product today thanks to the efforts of those joining us as cosponsors today," Lee said.
“This new bill modifies sensible sentencing reforms and maintains sensible approaches to reducing recidivism that have worked well in states like Rhode Island. As amended, it will still help reduce swelling prison populations and burdensome incarceration costs, and help inmates become productive members of our communities upon release. Since these changes to the bill have allowed us to attract even more bipartisan support, I urge Leader McConnell to take it up,” Whitehouse said.
“We maintain the tools law enforcement needs to continue making sure that the worst drug traffickers and violent criminals stay off of our streets. We also provide flexibility in sentencing for those offenders who deserve it. I’m proud this legislation, which was the product of months of negotiation, is picking up additional support from law enforcement as well as Republicans and Democrats in Congress,” Graham said.
“Months of hard work and bipartisan collaboration have yielded an even broader base of support for the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, and I believe it will pass the Senate if Senator McConnell brings it for a vote. This legislation would expand the number of people with nonviolent convictions who would benefit from a sentencing reduction while ensuring public safety. Mass incarceration is costing taxpayers billions and billions of dollars every year, draining our economy of potential, compromising public safety, hurting our children, and disproportionately affecting communities of color. Passing the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act would take a long-overdue step forward and help make our federal justice system more just. The time to act is now,” Booker said.
“There is bipartisan agreement that we need to make serious reforms to our criminal justice system, and we need to make them soon. We urge our Republican colleagues who haven’t yet signed on to this cause to give careful thought to the issue and join with us in moving this bill forward,” Schumer said.
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April 29, 2016
"to elevate the condition of men--to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance, in the race of life." --Abraham Lincoln
Chairman's Note: Restoring Congressional Accountability Through Appropriations Process
Of all the words that the American people use to describe Congress today, one of the most common — and accurate — is unaccountable.
As hardworking men and women across the country continue to protest dysfunctional and costly regulations, the response from their elected lawmakers remains the same: blame is shifted, fingers are pointed, and scapegoats are brought forth to defend those who are charged with making the laws.
This is the very definition of unaccountability, and it pervades the culture of Washington, because Congress has allowed it to infect our institutions.
Many Americans assume that they’re being lied to when their elected lawmakers blame someone else for the rules that are raising their cost of living and eating away at their paychecks.
But the truth is actually more troubling. Most of the items on the federal government’s list of do’s and don’ts are not written and passed by Congress at all – they are imposed unilaterally by unelected bureaucrats in one of the Executive Branch’s many administrative agencies.
No wonder federal regulations are estimated to cost the American people between $1 trillion and $2 trillion every year. And those trillions of dollars don’t just evaporate. They’re transferred from families and businesses who pay artificially inflated prices to all the special-interest middle-men who get rich off red tape.
For those who recognize the moral and material problems of hiding the regulatory process in a faceless bureaucracy, the REINS Act provides a commonsense solution. This bill would require congressional approval for all major regulatory rules, so that members of Congress would no longer be able to blame executive agencies for costly regulations.
Unfortunately, even with 37 cosponsors in the Senate and the endorsement of a majority in the House, support for the REINS Act has yet to reach a critical mass in Congress. But hope for regulatory reform is not lost.
As Congress proceeds through the appropriations process this Spring, each spending bill presents an opportunity to advance structural reforms that would restore congressional accountability over federal regulations. Think of it as the REINS Act in miniature: as each spending bill comes before Congress, reform-minded lawmakers have the opportunity to attach a REINS-like amendment requiring congressional approval for all major rules issued by the executive agencies that are funded by that particular bill.
Earlier this week, I pursued this strategy by trying to introduce an amendment that would restrict the Department of Energy from spending any funds to implement or enforce regulations whose compliance costs exceed $100 million unless specifically approved by Congress.
Regrettably, my amendment was blocked. But I’m confident that the defenders of the dysfunctional status quo will find it increasingly difficult to obstruct commonsense reforms that will make Congress more accountable to the public, because if Congress is ever going to win back the trust of the American people, we must prove that we are trustworthy. And the best way to do that is to make ourselves once again accountable for the consequences of the laws of this country.
Issue in Focus: A Step Forward with Electronic Communication Privacy
If a law-enforcement agency suspects that you have committed a crime, it must go before a judge and obtain a warrant in order to have the right to listen to your phone calls.
But thanks to a woefully outdated federal law – the Electronic Communications Protection Act (ECPA) – those same law-enforcement agencies do not need a warrant to read your emails. All they have to do is wait 180 days from when you sent an email and then tell whichever third party handles your account (like Gmail or Yahoo) that the correspondence is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation. That’s all it takes for the FBI, CIA, NSA, and a host of other law-enforcement agencies to gain access to your email account. And this can occur without you even knowing.
This is an affront to American values and a violation of the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.
At the time ECPA was created in 1986 – way back when desktop computers weighed more than a desk and floppy disks were actually floppy - electronic communications were still in their infancy. Little, if any data, was ever saved for very long, so it seemed sensible to write the law in a way that gave government agencies warrantless access to “abandoned” digital records.
But the world has changed a lot since 1986. Thanks to low-cost electronic data storage, virtually everything we do online now is recorded forever. And more to the point, to an extent unimaginable in 1986, our personal and professional lives today are conducted through – and therefore captured by – our email correspondence. (Just ask Hillary Clinton.)
So it is long past time to modernize ECPA and ensure that our constitutional protections against warrantless search conform with the technological realities of the 21st century. And that is exactly what would happen under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which passed the House of Representatives 419-0 on Wednesday.
Under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, law-enforcement agencies would still be able to use subpoenas to acquire from electronic-communications firms routing information, customer names, session-time records, and other non-content information that they may need to conduct an investigation. But the private content of our emails and other personal electronic files would be protected.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act is a commonsense reform that can help prove to the American people that our federal government still works. The Senate should take up this legislation soon.
Washington, D.C. Office
