This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 14th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The First Step Act, a recently popular criminal justice reform, which includes some sentencing reforms, now has legs in this lame duck session of Congress, and it has new support from the White House.

What's in it? Is it a first step or the best we can do?

Molly Gilles with families against mandatory minimums,

she discusses the proposed changes.

The president has come out in favor of the First Step Act, which we should note at this moment that it is an unfortunate acronym that we won't go into here.

By way of endorsing this legislation, he named checked Alice Johnson, the woman that he pardoned

earlier this year at the behest of Kim Kardashian, which I will again note has done more than

I ever have to get anyone out of prison.

He made a specific reference to the Clinton crime law

in undoing provisions of the law passed back in the 90s that was pretty severe with respect to some of its provisions.

So what did you think of the fact that now the White House is on board with what,

and I have to say he undersold it in a way.

He did.

It's a really historic criminal justice reform that we're talking about here.

The First Step Act is the first criminal justice reform that Congress will have passed since 2010.

There's only been one other major change to federal sentencing law in the last 30

years and that happened in 1994. So this is a historic bill, it's a historic moment, and he sold it in all the ways that it should be sold.

He mentioned all the law enforcement support, the overwhelming support from the faith community, the bipartisan support. the the political spectrum. So he highlighted everything that he should

highlight and that just means that it's time for the bill to go to a vote on the

Senate floor and the real question now is whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will allow the bill to get the vote that I think it deserves.

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