Denny Hastert is Contemptible, But His Indictment Exemplifies America’s Over-Criminalization [View all]

[damnedifIknow]

Bush-era House Speaker Denny Hastert, who was indicted yesterday, is a living, breathing embodiment of everything sleazy and wrong with U.S. politics. That is highlighted not only by his central role in enabling every War on Terror excess, but also by this fact:

Hastert’s ability to make such large cash payments probably came from his career as a K Street lobbyist. He entered Congress in 1987 with a net worth of no more than $270,000 and then exited worth somewhere between $4 million and $17 million, according to congressional disclosure documents."

Hastert is about the least sympathetic figure one can imagine. Beyond his above-listed sins, he shepherded the 2001 enactment and 2005 renewal of the Patriot Act, whose banking provisions, in sweet irony, seemed to have played a key role in his detection and in creating the crime of which he stands accused. His long record in Congress involved, among many things, denying equal rights to people based on the “Family Values” tripe, as well as continually supporting ever-increasing penalties and always-diminished rights for criminal defendants. So he’s reaping what he sowed."

*Radley Balko, who has done among the best work on the broken U.S. criminal justice system, said this morning: “Dennis Hastert is one of the last people I want to be defending. But these charges are the picture of over-criminalization run amok.”

*Long-time appellate judge Alex Kozinski co-authored an essay entitled “You’re (Probably) a Federal Criminal,” noting how easy it is to become a felon. “Most Americans are criminals, and don’t know it, or suspect that they are but believe they’ll never get prosecuted … Violations are so common that any attempt to go after all criminals would sweep up millions of people.”

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/29/denny-hastert-highly-unsympathetic-face-americas-criminalization-pathology/