News broke yesterday, via Ari Melber at MSNBC. Reform is here. Bipartisan reform. But the most important bit of news to foreshadow the details that are to be revealed, perhaps today, is that they have the support of Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Without his support, change is nearly impossible, as no law can get out of committee unless Grassley gives it a kiss. That’s how governance works in America. And, Melber says, Chuck Grassley has given this reform his blessing.

Top Senate Republicans and Democrats have reached a bipartisan deal on criminal justice reform, a breakthrough that has been years in the making.  The proposal, which may be announced as soon as Thursday, has the crucial backing of Sen. Chuck Grassley, the conservative chair of the Judiciary Committee.

Grassley, you see, believes that criminals in prison are criminals who can’t commit crimes, so the drop in crime experienced in America is due to our laws putting far more people in prison for far longer lengths of time, together with the penumbras of coerced cooperation and the rush to plead guilty.  All good for Grassley.

Judges, at least some of them, have tried to explain publicly why the simpleton’s view isn’t quite right. Judge Mark Bennett of Grassley’s own state. Judge Richard Kopf of the state next door, still close enough to smell the “fetid feedlot” of Iowa. Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York.

All have spoken out publicly that Grassley is wrong about sentencing. Dangerously wrong.  Mass-incarceration-such-as-the-civilized-world-has-never-seen level wrong. Not that he cares what some pointy headed federal judges think. They don’t “get it” like he does. Dunning-Kruger afflicts the Senate as well as the sewer.

But we have reform. We know because Melber tells us so.

Beyond reforming the length of some prison terms, the bill would also bulk up rehab programs for selected inmates, including job training, drug treatment and religious programs designed to reduce recidivism. The proposal also restricts the use of solitary confinement for juveniles, an increasingly controversial practice in American prisons.

Well, this doesn’t sound bad. It’s not much, given these programs already exist, but they could be made better, more available, more meaningful even if it doesn’t inject the dubious notion of embracing religion to affect secular punishment.  The solitary confinement for juveniles seems more significant than it is, given that there aren’t many kids in federal prisons, but it sounds good.

The proposal would also expand a reform Congress previously passed, The Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the punishment disparity in crack and powder cocaine.

That’s good, even if its merely perpetuating a battle that never should have been necessary, the hysteria that caused Congress to make crack sentences 100 times more severe than powdered coke, even though it was the same friggin’ thing. Nice to see they didn’t undo what’s already been recognized, even if its now 17 to 1 rather than 1 to 1 as any sane nation would do.

The bill would reform federal prison sentencing to reduce some of the automatic and harsh punishments Congress passed since it began cracking down on drug use. It would end the federal “three strikes” rule and limit the use of mandatory 10-year sentences for offenders who have not committed violent or major felonies.

This sounds great, except to those who actually understand how the system works. For one thing, it “fixes” the problem many use to argue against mandatory minimums, the mythical low-level, non-violent drug offender swept up in the nightmare. While there some defendants who fit this description, they are few and far between, at least from a distance.

The reality is that there are tons of them, but they’re swept up in multi-defendant conspiracy cases, where they’re attributed vast amounts of drugs with which they have no actual connection, often don’t even exist (the “ghost” drug problem), and one co-conspirator’s pistol stuff in a sock drawer.

The feds indict them as if they’re drug kingpins, even if their real role is to fetch coffee for a dime bag street seller, five levels removed from anybody who really fits the description.  Still, even if this sounds far more reform-y than it is, it’s not a bad thing.

But why does Grassley approve?  Because there’s a give-back that brings a smile to his face.

The draft bill’s approach to punishment, however, does not simply march in one direction of rehab and more leniency. It would also expand mandatory minimum sentences for certain offenses, enhancing their use to punish selected firearm crimes and creating new mandatory minimums for offenses related to domestic violence and supporting terrorism.

Boom. What few outside the courthouse realize is that there are vastly more defendants prosecuted for crime that either is, or at least made to sound, violent rather than drugs.  The story that our mass incarceration problem is all about these low-lever non-violent drug offenders is coming back to bite us in the butt. And Chuck Grassley knows it. He gets it. He used it against us.

And so we begged for reform, and Grassley gave it to us, good and hard.  We get a tiny slice of a loaf that’s nearly non-existent to begin with, because so many well-intended but misguided reformers thought that the best selling point for reform was to hold out the handful of defendants who made people cry for the wrongfulness of their sentence.

And in return, Grassley gets to burn the vast majority of defendants who nobody wants to think about, to talk about, because they make lousy poster-boys and require way too much thought to understand why they, too, should be worthy of our sympathy and concern.

It’s not that what they did was pleasant or inconsequential.  It’s that putting them in prison for ever and ever goes so far beyond anything justifiable, except when one believes as Grassley does that life plus cancer would be the perfect sentence for any criminal.

And in exchange for cutting a tiny handful of defendants a potential break, Grassley got mandatory minimums for the rest of them.  We got reform, and Grassley got everything his tiny, little, mean-spirited, ignorant heart desired.  Go team.