![]() While the recent Supreme Court decision to free tens of thousands of California prisoners due to overcrowding has upset conservatives (Justice Antonin Scalia dissented strongly, describing the potential release of “46,000 happy-go-lucky felons”), the magnitude of the decision makes it even harder to pretend the U.S. The party of Nixon’s 1968 law-and-order campaign, Just Say No, and the Willie Horton ad is now seeing a growing number of leaders tackling what once would have been political suicide: reforming the country’s overwhelmed criminal justice system. “I helped push the same laws that put me away all these years,” he told us in his first interview since his release in January. Kennedy insists he was the victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but a bitter irony still overwhelms him. Recently dozens of leading conservatives gathered at a private home in Virginia to welcome him back to society. Then some business deals went south and he was convicted of racketeering and money laundering and spent 17 years behind bars (his first night in Colorado’s Ed Meese Detention Center, of all places). But it still seems like a great idea.Back in the early 1990s, William Kennedy was a power player who toed the Republican Party line and put the likes of Ed Meese, Ronald Reagan’s tough-on-crime attorney general, on the cover of his Conservative Digest magazine. Kilpatrick, urged Meese to quit and go to court on his own time. Who would have thought that Ginsburg’s nomination would go up in a cloud of pot smoke?īad rap or not, noted conservative columnist and Reagan apologist James J. ![]() Everybody in the White House loved Douglas Ginsburg even though the only thing they knew about him was that he was a right-winger who had never had a federal job long enough to incriminate himself. What bugged them was their belief that he mucked up the president’s plan to find a Supreme Court nominee who would be just as offensive to Congress as his first unsuccessful candidate, Robert Bork. The attorney general’s conservative critics weren’t bothered just because he was accident prone whenever he came close to an ethic. Maybe that wasn’t as warm an endorsement as Bert Lance got when Jimmy Carter told his soon-to-depart-under-duress pal, “Bert, I’m proud of you.” But it wasn’t bad. Reagan put his arm around Meese and said, “He’s no embarrassment to me.” That led to one of the top lawman’s finest moments in public life. He was, they cried out, an embarrassment to Reagan and the Republican party. It seems like only yesterday that some of the president’s staunchest conservative supporters were calling for Meese’s resignation. One of Meese’s most time-consuming courtroom duties has been explaining how much he knew about the sale of arms to Iran, the transfer of profits from those sales to the Contras, and how hard he worked at not learning anything about the operations of Ollie North, John Poindexter and their rollicking crew of free-lance foreign policy makers. ![]() The last famous unindicted coconspirator was the only president ever to resign in disgrace. The Wedtech probe probably won’t result in any jail time for the attorney general but it could earn him one of the seamiest of legal titles - an unindicted coconspirator. ![]() But troublemakers are trying to make something out of the fact that Meese later reversed Justice Department policy and approved a recommendation that regional Bell companies be allowed to make phone equipment, provide long distance service and dabble in computer science. ![]() In an administration that oozes money that is peanuts. It seems they reached out and touched the attorney general at a time when he owned $10,000 worth of telephone stock. The latter problem involves a series of meetings during which Meese listened to the assorted concerns of several phone company executives. ![]()
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