The Senate’s Unwillingness to Pass the EQUAL Act Highlights Its Dysfunction

By Kevin Ring

When Lavonda Bonds, Yvonne Mosley, and Sagan Soto-Stanton saw the U.S. House overwhelmingly pass a bill last September to eliminate the federal sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, they were excited and hopeful. Their loved ones, who’ve each spent decades languishing in federal prison, could finally come home if the Senate would simply follow suit and pass this noncontroversial reform, known as the EQUAL Act.

Eight months later, these three women — and thousands of other families — are still waiting for the Senate to act.

They want to know what the holdup is. They think I might know because I have been working in and around Congress for the past 30 years, first as a Capitol Hill staffer, then as a lobbyist, and for the past 13 years, as a D.C.-based advocate for families with loved ones in prison.

Unfortunately, I have to tell them all the same thing: The Senate is broken. And the EQUAL Act is perhaps the best and most infuriating example of just how broken the Senate has become — it can’t even pass a bill with broad, bipartisan support and fix a 36-year-old mistake.

Congress created the infamous 100:1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses in 1986, at the height of the drug war. People who sold just five grams of crack cocaine — the weight of a nickel — began to receive the same five-year mandatory minimum prison sentence as people who sold 500 grams of powder cocaine.

Although experts quickly concluded the purported reasoning for treating these two forms of the same drug differently was flawed, the 1986 law filled federal prisons with low-level dealers and people with substance abuse disorders. Worse, the crack disparity devastated primarily Black families, sending a generation of mostly Black young men to prison for decades.

Congress, which voted unanimously in 2010 to reduce the disparity to 18:1, looked poised to finally eliminate it this year. A diverse coalition of groups from across the ideological spectrum, including organizations representing police and prosecutors, civil rights, and civil liberties, joined together to support the EQUAL Act to end the unwarranted disparity.

The U.S. House approved the EQUAL Act last September by a vote of 361–66. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), conservative Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), and nearly 70 percent of the Republican caucus joined every House Democrat in a powerful display of bipartisanship on a matter of equal justice.

As attention turned to the Senate, the bill’s supporters secured eleven Republican cosponsors (and more private commitments) to demonstrate that the EQUAL Act was bipartisan, popular, and would not fall victim to the filibuster, the Senate rule requiring 60 votes to cut off debate. There’s no threat of filibuster preventing a vote for the EQUAL act, which could change the lives of thousands of suffering families.

So what’s the problem? Senators may have to vote on amendments that get offered to the bill and they are scared. They fear that members in the small minority who oppose the bill will offer amendments that sound good, yet are bad policy, known as “poison pills.”

This fear has always existed, especially in election years, but in recent years it has grown to the point of creating paralysis. In the past, supporters of important reforms would stand together in opposition to obviously ill-intentioned amendments.

But senators today obsess over voting against poison pills they think will hurt their re-election chances, and leaders of the Senate’s majority party fear these votes could lose their side’s control of the chamber. The Democrats control the Senate now, but this has been the practice of both parties in recent years.

The result is an unwillingness to move even popular reforms like the EQUAL Act. Filibuster or not, the Senate is broken. And if it doesn’t get fixed soon, the families of Lavonda, Yvonne, Sagan, and thousands of others will remain separated by prison bars for no reason.

Contact your senators today and demand they pass the EQUAL Act.

Kevin Ring is FAMM’s president.