If You Can’t Kill It, Join It
Trump’s nominee to this panel called it “an overfed lemur.”
The U.S. Sentencing Commission is a bipartisan, independent, seven-member panel that sets sentencing guidelines for federal judges. Although it rarely attracts public attention, in recent years it has done more than Congress or the White House to reduce the population of the federal prison system, mainly by recommending lighter sentences for drug offenses.
In the nearly three decades since its creation, those who closely monitor the commission cannot remember a time when a nominee was contested in a Senate confirmation hearing.
But the nomination of Georgetown University Law Professor William G. Otis, a flamboyant advocate of the tougher-on-crime views endorsed by President
