Ten Senate Republicans have signed on to a bill that would eliminate the federal sentencing disparity between drug offenses involving crack and powder cocaine, paving the way for likely passage in the evenly divided chamber where 60 votes are needed for most legislation.
“That looks like you’d get to 60, really,” said Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, one of the 10 GOP co-sponsors of the EQUAL Act. “This is the Democrats’ prerogative, it’d be nice if they would bring it to the floor.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer signed onto the bill as a co-sponsor on Monday, but his office did not immediately respond to questions on his plans for floor debate. The bill passed the House, 361-66, in September and President Joe Biden, who campaigned on criminal justice reform, is expected to sign the measure when it reaches his desk.
The bill, sponsored by Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker, eliminates the lower quantity thresholds for crack cocaine, which the bill’s proponents have said unjustly targets Black offenders.
In 2020, the U.S. Sentencing Commission found that 77.1% of crack cocaine trafficking offenders were Black and 6.3% were white. Yet white people are more likely to use cocaine in their lifetime than any other group, according to the 2020 National Survey of Drug Use and Health.
Current laws establish an 18-to-1 ratio on federal penalties for crack and powder cocaine, meaning anyone found with 28 grams of crack cocaine would face the same five-year mandatory prison sentence as a person found with 500 grams of powder cocaine.
“These baseless and unscientific guidelines are another harsh reality of how our nation’s failed War on Drugs have disproportionately impacted people of color and underserved communities,” Booker said in a statement. “The time for change is now.”
Criminal justice overhaul is a rare area for bipartisan cooperation in a deeply divided Congress. In 2018, Booker and Durbin teamed up with Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Mike Lee on the First Step Act, which was intended to reduce overly punitive sentences and was supported by then-President Donald Trump.
Sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine were originally created in 1986 with a 100-to-1 ratio.
The Sentencing Commission issued a special report in 1995 stating the 100-to-1 ratio punished low-level crack dealers “far more severely” than high-level suppliers of powder cocaine, despite there being no pharmacological difference between the two forms of the drug. Then-President Bill Clinton and Congress rejected the commission’s recommendations to amend the law.
Fifteen years later, Congress reduced the sentencing disparity to 18-to-1, but advocates have fought to further narrow the sentencing gap.
“Our justice system just isn’t fair if we have a disparity that persists when the drugs are the same. And when that disparity disproportionately impacts Black people,” Aamra Ahmad, senior policy council at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Justice Division, said.
Senator Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, recently signed on as a co-sponsor of the bill after studying the issue with constituents, he said, and determining this would be a step toward “criminal justice fairness.”
Moran said it is his “expectation that this bill will be considered by the Senate.”
