President Barack Obama invited Sen. Mike Lee and several members of Congress to the White House this week to discuss how over-criminalization, over-incarceration and over-sentencing can be reduced.
“After a generation of tough-on-crime policies helped make communities around the country safer, many of our federal criminal justice laws are now out of date, counterproductive and unfair,” said Sen. Lee.
He added, “Given the immense financial and human cost of our broken status quo, I was pleased to join President Obama and my congressional colleagues for a dialogue to find bipartisan solutions to these problems.”
One of the solutions discussed during the meeting was the Smarter Sentencing Act, a bill that Sen. Lee recently introduced in the Senate with Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois. It seeks to modernize federal drug sentencing laws and provide immediate relief to an overburdened prison system, according to Lee.
The Smarter Sentencing Act will give judges flexibility and discretion to impose stiff sentences on the most serious drug lords and cartel bosses, while enabling nonviolent offenders to return more quickly to their families and communities, he said.
“I’m hopeful that the Senate will take up this bipartisan piece of legislation sometime soon, and in the meantime, I look forward to continuing to work with my colleagues across the aisle to find sensible solutions to our nation’s most pressing problems,” said Lee.
Lee’s invitation to participate in the bipartisan White House conference came one week after he was outed as the most ideologically conservative member of the 113th Congress by Michael Barber, a Brigham Young University associate professor of political science.
Barber published a report on the website, utahdatapoints.com, that applied a statistical tool used by political scientists that analyzes roll call votes of legislators to come up with a score that represents a legislator’s ideology.
The scores range from minus one to one. Positive scores indicate a conservative ideology and negative scores indicate a liberal ideology.
At 0.991 Lee received the highest rating of all members of Congress, placing him on the farthest spot on the right wing of Congress.
The most liberal member of Congress was Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, with a score of minus 0.662.