Mr. PAUL. I thank the gentleman for yielding. [Page: H6203] Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this legislation. It’s called the Fair Sentencing Act. I’d like to rename it, though. I’d like to call it the Slightly Fairer Resentencing Act, because it really makes an attempt to correct a very, very serious problem in equal justice in our systems, and that effort I think we should all applaud. I would have much preferred H.R. 3245. I was an original cosponsor of that along with Congressman Scott, but I think this is a typical example of trying to fix a problem that we invite upon ourselves.
In economics, I adhere to the position that once you want to do some good in the economy, with all the best motivations, we do things and we create new problems and we have to go back. If you get two new problems for every intervention, then you’re constantly writing laws.
Well, in social policy, I believe the same thing. It was trying to improve social policy with crack cocaine. There was no evidence on this. It was designed to help people, especially the minorities that were using crack cocaine, and they thought this was terrible, and it turned out that its law backfired. It actually hurt minorities, didn’t help them. Here we are trying to correct this disparity, and it just, to me, confirms the fact that government management, whether it is the economy or social policy, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
When this country decided it was very dangerous to drink alcohol and we had to stop it, back in those days, in the teens of the last century, they decided in order for the government to do this they had to amend the Constitution. Can you imagine anybody being concerned today by what we do here and say we have to amend the Constitution? Oh, no. We amended the Constitution. It was a bomb. It made alcohol much more dangerous. All the drug dealers sold the alcohol, and the alcohol was more concentrated and less pure. People died. People woke up and they repealed it.
This is what’s going to have to happen someday. We need to repeal the war on drugs.
