Twitter is in a frenzy after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) made comments accusing President Donald Trump’s administration of holding immigrants detained at the U.S.-Mexico border in “concentration camps.” For multiple reasons, her tweets reveal a troubling ignorance of history and are counterproductive to finding real solutions to immigration challenges.

Ocasio-Cortez claimed that “expert analysis” concluded the Trump administration “has established concentration camps on the southern border.” She further attacked “shrieking Republicans,” who resisted her use of the term “concentration camps,” by claiming that “concentration camps are not the same as death camps” and “are considered by experts as ‘the mass detention of civilians without trial.’”

She also made similar accusations in an Instagram video, invoking the Holocaust remembrance phrase “Never Again.”

“If that doesn’t bother you…I want to talk to the people that [sic] are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘never again’ means something,” she said.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter

This administration has established concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying. This is not hyperbole. It is the conclusion of expert analysis ⬇️ https://t.co/2dWHxb7UuL

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter

And for the shrieking Republicans who don't know the difference: concentration camps are not the same as death camps. Concentration camps are considered by experts as "the mass detention of civilians without trial." And that's exactly what this administration is doing.

Let’s start with the basic premise that immigration is a complex and challenging topic in a nation that has more immigrants than any other on the planet. It is not reasonable to allow people to cross the border without supervision or restriction. With that said, there certainly are valid criticisms of how the White House has handled a number of immigration-related issues.

Even if you agree with the most hawkish immigration views espoused by the Trump administration, and want even legal immigration sharply reduced, there are still major inefficiencies in how immigrants are processed. Once we take people into custody, we have a moral duty to do what we can to ensure their safe and humane treatment.

One standout problem with the controversial child separation policy is the lack of planning for how to keep track of which children belong to which adults or how to reunite them. Last year, I brought up the bar code ID wristbands most hospitals use for newborn babies in several tweets. The wristbands and scanners are cheap and simple technology and would have greatly simplified reunifications, especially for younger children with less developed verbal skills.

Sarah Rumpf on Twitter

When you have a baby in most hospitals, they put wristbands on both Mom & baby, waterproof & scannable bar code w/ID info. It's cheap technology. Why couldn't gov't have done something similar w/these immigrant kids, esp. the youngest ones? Would simplify reunification.

There are documented cases of human traffickers attempting to bring children over the border to be victimized, cartels seeking to present young male gang members as “teenage children,” and many border crossers lack ID documents, so it is reasonable for authorities to make efforts to verify identities and family relationships. But sending children and adults to separate locations, often with hundreds or even thousands of miles in between, without common-sense tracking procedures, leads to the government-created chaos and heartbreaking tales of trauma widely reported in the news.

All of this to say, I have no problem conceding the point to Ocasio-Cortez that improvements are needed in our immigration system, which currently contains avoidable cruelties.

What is not fair, however, is her accusation that the United States is operating “concentration camps.”

To support her accusation, Ocasio-Cortez cites experts like historian Andrea Pitzer who use a broad definition of the term, applying it to “the mass detention of civilians without trial.”

Several left-leaning publications concurred with Ocasio-Cortez, with Esquire quoting a University of Virginia professor to say, “Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz,” and Slate posting a meandering article titled, “Not Every Concentration Camp is Auschwitz.”

With all due respect to the sources Ocasio-Cortez rounded up, the basic core of Ocasio-Cortez’s definition is flawed, not because the detention centers don’t constitute “concentrating” people or because they can’t plausibly be construed as “camps.” It’s because there is something crucial missing from the characterization. It is simply false to say that they are being held “without trial.”

The fundamental purpose for their detention is to give the American authorities time to verify identities and facts supporting any claims for asylum or other status that would grant a right to entry, and then to hold a hearing where the case can be resolved. They are literally being held for the purpose of having a hearing.

Ocasio-Cortez appears to be opposed to any detentions at all, based on her comments calling for the abolition of ICE and her criticisms of our border patrol protocols. That’s a radical view, and not one that has widespread support among Americans.

It is impractical, inefficient, and a risk to national security to allow immigrants to cross the border illegally and then release them unsupervised into the general population without any plausible way to track them and compel them to return for their hearings. Conservatives have rightfully criticized “catch and release” tactics as the antithesis of sensible border security.

Are we keeping people in humane conditions? Does it take too long to be able to have a hearing? What can we do to verify children’s identities more quickly and accurately, so that they can remain with their parents?

These are all fair questions to ask. But unless we decide to start putting ankle bracelets on all illegal immigrants, or we develop the technology capable of reliably tracking them, the function of detainment centers as a prelude to receiving a hearing is going to continue.

Let’s examine another key difference between concentration camps and immigrant detention centers. A concentration camp involves forcibly gathering up people based on some individuating characteristic (religion, sexual orientation, race, etc.) or activity (political dissidents, accused traitors, etc.).

The detention centers are holding people based on activity taken at a physical location: they were found crossing the U.S. border illegally. These immigrants are detained without regard to race, religion, or any other category. They chose to cross the border illegally, not only knowing there was a risk they would be apprehended by Border Patrol, but many of them actively seeking out the Border Patrol agents and voluntarily surrendering.

Moreover, as multiple conservatives pointed out on Twitter yesterday, the immigrants in U.S. detention centers have the option to agree to be deported back home. Concentration camps are not known for allowing their prisoners to voluntarily leave to go home or anywhere else.

The bottom line is that the foundational goals of concentration camps and the U.S. detention centers are completely different. As stated above, the detention centers are meant to hold immigrants until their status can be ascertained and a hearing held to determine their fate.

The purpose of a concentration camp is far more nefarious: to remove unwanted people from the main population. Whether that elimination is accomplished by murdering them outright, as countless Holocaust victims were led off the trains straight into the gas chambers, or by imposing harsh working conditions, starvation rations, and a deprivation of proper medical care until prisoners collapse and die, the goal is the same, to wipe out the targeted group of people.

In an earlier Arc Digital piece, I described my visit to the Dachau concentration camp, and the terrible realization that it was in the middle of the town, which meant that there was “simply no plausible deniability that the people of Dachau were unaware of what was happening within that camp.” Inside the walls, the barracks with small wooden bunk beds that had been overcrowded with prisoners and the row of large brick ovens lined up to burn bodies make the purpose of that evil place heartbreakingly clear.

The Most Terrible Thing I Saw at Dachau

Even concentration camps where the prisoners are not actively being targeted for murder, such as the Japanese internment camps President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered to open during World War II, the goal is still segregation based on a prejudicial view of certain personal characteristics of the prisoners, to isolate the disfavored population and remove them from society.

None of that applies to the U.S. detention centers. We are not seeking to remove any populations based on racial, religious, etc., categories from American communities, and we are certainly not seeking to kill anyone, much less wipe out an entire population.

It is true that there have been deaths and illnesses, but that’s not baked into the goal of the detain-until-hearing protocol. Obviously, these incidents must be investigated swiftly, thoroughly, and transparently, so that the best efforts can be made to minimize such tragedies in the future.

Several news reports mention medical services and lifesaving measures that were attempted for these immigrants who died after being held in the detention centers. It is unfortunate that they failed, but those attempts further show how absurd the “concentration camp” term is for this situation. It would not have been common practice at all for a Nazi camp guard to give CPR to a prisoner who collapsed; to the contrary, if any of their slave labor were injured or fell ill and were unable to recover extremely quickly, they would be left to die if not killed on the spot.

To sum up: a concentration camp seeks to eliminate a targeted population of people, by directly killing them or working them to death. The goal is death. In contrast, if a death happens in a U.S. detention center, it is contrary to the facility’s goals.

David Harsanyi wrote a detailed and graphic description of some of the horrific conditions at the Auschwitz concentration camp, including punishingly long work hours, depressingly meager food rations, lice and flea infestations, and rats biting people’s fingers and toes while they slept. The human toll was staggering:

A third of the prisoners died every week. If a worker was hurt, they were allotted three days of recovery time. If they failed to heal, the infirmary — where Dr. Mengele was already begun his nefarious work on women and children — would inject a fatal dose of phenol directly into their hearts.

Of the 2,722 Slovakian Jews who had been rounded up with Weczler and Vrba, only 159 survived to the summer of 1942. Those who died had been dumped, with another approximately 105,000 bodies, into shallow trenches around Birkenau. “As they decomposed” Conot noted, “the earth rose like a yeasty mixture of dough and bubbled up nauseating gases, which spread for miles.”

It is true that other groups besides the Nazis have used the term “concentration camp,” but once the Nazis were involved, the connotation of the term changed forever, to be inextricably intertwined with their identity.

This is partly a result of the sheer scale of the evil committed — the millions of innocent lives taken, the towns scattered across Europe where once-thriving Jewish communities are gone forever — but also because of the sheer breadth of the shocking and brutal images and stories that the world learned as the Third Reich collapsed.

Photos and videos showing people so gaunt it seems impossible they could still stand, or worse, piles of dead bodies. The piles of shoes, eyeglasses, dentures, and jewelry confiscated before prisoners were sent to the gas chambers. Add in the many powerfully realistic portrayals of the Holocaust in movies and television shows, and the Nazi version of a concentration camp is the one that is overwhelmingly dominant in people’s minds.

A similar situation happened with the swastika. That symbol had been used for centuries by various cultures throughout Europe, Asia, India, and the Middle East. Ocasio-Cortez’s “experts” say that people besides the Nazis operated concentration camps, and that is factually accurate, as it is to say that other cultures have used swastika symbols. But it is irrevocably a Nazi symbol now. Hang a swastika flag in front of your house and try to convince your neighbors that you’ve simply converted to an ancient religion.

In a more humorous example, silent film star Charlie Chaplin’s “Tramp” character famously sported the same style of toothbrush mustache that Adolf Hitler would later adopt, but after the Nazis, the Hitler association was the dominant one.

Our immigration detention centers are not without serious flaws, but they are not concentration camps and it’s dishonest to describe them that way. As Arc Digital Editor-in-Chief Berny Belvedere pointed out, Ocasio-Cortez and her supporters are trying to stretch the phrase’s definition in both directions: to “define it down” to give them more ability to apply it to the detention centers, but still take advantage of the term’s “historical severity to score points.”

Berny Belvedere on Twitter

Thing is, you're defining down "concentration camp" in order to specify conceptual parameters that will allow you to include Trump's border detainment centers, yet, rhetorically, you're relying on the term's historical severity to score points. Can't have it both ways. https://t.co/PCeCS7bF9S

As is all too common with political arguments, once the debate has devolved into one side calling the other Literally Hitler, progress becomes far more difficult. When someone is accusing you of being philosophically kindred spirits with evil that, in self-conscious expectation of genocide, eliminated millions of innocents, why would you trust them to have a fair and honest negotiation?

Trump is president in no small part because conservatives spent years watching the Democrats casually toss around the most outrageous defamatory talking points to attack Republicans as racist, sexist, homophobic monsters, and the mainstream media mindlessly parroted their claims.

Remember the attacks on Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) during his 2012 presidential campaign over the “binders full of women”? Romney had made an earnest effort to recruit qualified female candidates for his administration as governor of Massachusetts, and by all objective measures succeeded, “ultimately receiving high marks for the number of women he appointed to high-level administration posts and state courts,” including Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey and his chief of staff Beth Myers. Somehow the existence of these binders was twisted into oppression of women or some other type of misogyny.

Ocasio-Cortez has every right to criticize our immigration policies, especially where our government has failed to protect vulnerable people in their custody. But comparing these detention centers, designed to process immigrants voluntarily appearing to apply for entry, with concentration camps intended to exterminate entire populations, is counterproductive to achieving real reforms.

Since Ocasio-Cortez made her comments on Instagram and Twitter, the story has consumed prominent bandwidth in the political media world, with both sides quibbling back and forth about the definition of “concentration camp,” whether her comments were insensitive to Holocaust victims and their families, if there was a meaningful difference between “death camps” and “work camps” (where they starved and worked the victims to death), a corollary debate about whether it was problematic for non-Jews like Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Meghan McCain to defend Jewish interests…and the merry-go-round spins and spins and spins, getting nowhere.

Missing in virtually all of these boisterous debates: any meaningful discussion about practical, effective reforms. Any debate about possible solutions was drowned out by the Twitter mobs yelling at each other about whether or not the White House is full of Nazis.

Arc associate editor Nicholas Clairmont wrote at the Washington Examiner about the use of “concentration camp” as a euphemism used by dictators to cover up killing people, and similar to Harsanyi’s analysis, denounced the idea of applying such a loaded propagandistic term to more benign circumstances like the immigration detention centers:

The thinking is that if you use melodramatic words, people will care more and think differently about a political issue. To change the world, change the language. Limit the language. This kind of lexical activism assumes the barriers to action are in our words, not in our ideas.

As Clairmont notes, this reasoning is fundamentally flawed. The melodramatic language makes the underlying argument ring false, regardless of its merits. A better strategy can be found in children’s literature.

In the classic Hans Christian Andersen tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a small child is able to convince an entire crowd of important government officials, community leaders, and other adults the painful and embarrassing truth about what their monarch was wearing that day — absolutely nothing — by simply and clearly stating the truth.

It is important to note, however, that the child’s outburst exhibited pinpoint accuracy. He didn’t criticize the clothes he imagined the emperor might have been wearing, or comment about what he wore last week, or try to start a debate about what garments are proper for emperors. He simply said the facts, “He’s wearing nothing at all!”

Ocasio-Cortez has the benefit of a large audience, passionate supporters, and a steady media spotlight. Even as a freshman member of Congress, she could be that child speaking truth to power, convincing the crowd to admit the painful reality of the very serious problems in our immigration system.

Instead, she has chosen to be a sideshow, spending her energy demanding the abolishment of ICE — a impractical idea that is highly unlikely, even under a potential future Democratic presidency — and aggressively attempting to force a term heavily laden with Nazi connotations onto a situation that does not warrant it.

Sarah Rumpf is a frequent contributor to Arc Digital. Follow her on Twitter: @rumpfshaker.

No, the U.S. is Not Running “Concentration Camps” at the Border was originally published in Arc Digital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This week, we watched our leaders in Washington scurry around to cobble together a deal in order to avoid a government shutdown. This, of course, coming less than a month after the longest-ever shutdown in American history resulted in scores of federal employees struggling without paychecks, national parks and valuable scientific research put at risk, and airport security lines grinding to a halt.

News reports indicate that a deal has been struck for an appropriations bill to keep the government open. Here’s where things stand, as of writing: President Donald Trump is planning to declare a national emergency to redirect an additional $6 billion in funds for a border wall, Democrats have vowed to challenge that, and the whole deal could yet fall apart.

But the most important question we should ask has nothing to do with the specifics of those moves listed above. It’s this: How did we get in this mess in the first place?

In other words, why are we managing the federal budget with gigantic, last-minute bills? Why are we risking throwing a giant wrench in America’s economic engine again? Isn’t there a better way to manage the national budget?

Of course there is.

One better way is the system that Congress themselves established. The trouble is, they don’t follow their own rules — and we are failing to hold them accountable.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: under the U.S. Constitution, Congress has the power to appropriate funds, and they spend money in two categories: mandatory spending and discretionary spending.

Mandatory spending is enacted by law and can continue without needing a specific appropriations bill. Examples include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlement programs.

Discretionary spending, on the other hand, requires a specific act of Congress to appropriate the funds. With some rare exceptions like certain military procurements and housing programs, the vast majority of discretionary spending items require an annual appropriations bill.

In Fiscal Year 2017, 63 percent or about $2.6 trillion of federal spending was mandatory spending, 30 percent or $1.2 trillion was discretionary spending, and the remaining roughly 7 percent represented net interest on the federal debt.

It’s the 30 percent of the budget constituting discretionary spending that can trigger the need for a government shutdown.

The process for managing discretionary spending was established by the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, which has been amended several times but the fundamental procedures have not changed.

Congress must pass an appropriations bill for every subcategory of discretionary spending. Currently, there are 12 required subcategories, 12 appropriations subcommittees for each of these in both the House and Senate (Defense, Homeland Security, Interior and the Environment, Transportation and Housing and Urban Development, etc.), and Congress is supposed to pass 12 appropriations bills.

That’s what they’re supposed to do.

Congress does have the power to combine those 12 appropriations bills into one or more omnibus bills, but they are required to approve appropriations for all 12 subcategories of discretionary spending by the end of the fiscal year, which falls on September 30 every year.

If they fail to meet that fiscal year deadline, the federal government goes into shutdown unless they pass a continuing resolution authorizing expenditures of the funds.

In the years since the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 was signed into law by President Richard Nixon, Congress has managed to pass all their required annual appropriations bills by the deadline only four times: 1977, 1989, 1995, and 1997.

Some years they have been able to finish some of the appropriations bills on time and relied on continuing resolutions for the others, but they haven’t passed a complete budget on time in over 20 years.

Instead, we end up with the pattern we’re in again this year, one of missed deadlines, continuing resolutions, and then behemoth omnibus bills passed with little review.

Remember, these are the rules and procedures that Congress wrote for themselves.

News broke this week that our national debt had hit a new high of $22 trillion. Again, that’s a huge number with 12 zeros —$22,000,000,000,000 — maybe we should start writing out these gigantic debt numbers to drive the point home?

A major contributing factor to this enormous debt is the sloppiness with which Congress has managed its budget process. Wasteful government spending is inherently part of our system, but when the appropriations bills have to go through openly debated, public hearings in their committees, it gives the American people and media a better opportunity to observe the process, allows better deliberation and decision making, and theoretically involves members of Congress who are able to develop expertise regarding the specific programs they are funding.

Contrast that with the way these gargantuan omnibus spending bills have been managed.

Last year, House Republican leaders dropped a 2,232-page omnibus spending bill in March, giving members less than 24 hours before they were forced to vote on it or get blamed for continuing the government shutdown.

This week’s “Consolidated Appropriations Act, Conference Report to H.J.Res. 31" is a smaller-but-still-far-from-svelte 1,169 pages, covering the remaining seven appropriations bills Congress has failed to pass from Fiscal Year 2018, was released Thursday evening.

Under former Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the House passed a “three-day rule” that was theoretically supposed to require at least three days for members to be able to read and study bills before voting. In practice, leadership often dropped bills in the waning minutes before midnight, called that Day One, and then scheduled votes in the early hours of Day Three — it was technically three different days, but barely more than 24 hours would have passed.

When the Democrats took over the House after November’s midterm elections, they expanded the three-day rule to require it to actually mean 72 hours, but they somehow aren’t following it with this bill either. Only about 12 hours will have passed when this bill comes up for a vote.

FreedomWorks has graded this bill as a “Key Vote NO,” issuing a statement on Friday from their President, Adam Brandon, slamming the bill for “spend[ing] profligately as Congress recklessly attempts to cover for itself being nearly six months late on doing its job.”

“Likely fewer than 12 hours will have passed between members laying eyes on this bill and members casting their votes on it,” wrote Brandon. “This means that nobody will have read it and nobody will be fully aware of what is in it, but, of course, members will be told they need to support it or be blamed for another shutdown.

“This is simply no way to govern.”

Indeed.

Don’t Forget the Real Reason Shutdowns Happen was originally published in Arc Digital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every January, we recognize Holocaust Remembrance Day as a day to honor the memories of the millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, mentally and physically disabled people, political dissidents, and other innocent victims who were murdered by the Nazis in one of the worst genocides known to human history.

To fully understand the meaning of this day, and why it is so important to remember the horrors of the Holocaust, I want to share what I observed when I visited Dachau during a college summer abroad in Germany.

Dachau is the Southern Bavarian town where the first concentration camp in Germany was opened in 1933. Today, the camp remains open as a historical site and memorial to the victims.

Like other concentration camps, Dachau was a brutal work camp until the end of the war. Besides the inhumane living conditions, malnutrition, disease epidemics, suicides, and those killed directly by the guards, prisoners were also subjected to horrific medical experiments. Official Nazi records document the intake of over 200,000 prisoners and the deaths of nearly 32,000 until the camp was liberated in 1945, but the true death count is undoubtedly much higher.

The crematoria that burned countless human bodies into ash still stand. When I visited, it was chilling to walk inside these buildings to peer inside the ovens and wonder how many victims, many of their names lost forever to history, might have been eliminated within.

Still, the most disturbing sight at Dachau was nothing I witnessed within its gates, but rather just outside it.

Unlike camps like Auschwitz that were located in more rural areas, Dachau’s camp is directly within its city limits. Visitors to the memorial take a short train ride from Munich, walk down picturesque Bavarian streets that look like they were designed to be featured on postcards, past homes and schools and shops…

…and then come face to face with the metal gate that says, “Arbeit Macht Frei.” The cruelly dishonest phrase — German for “work sets you free” — was also featured on the camp gates at Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, and Theresienstadt.

Its presence on the Dachau gate made it clear this was no ordinary prison.

I expected to see the crematoria and mass graves. I expected to see primitive barracks where people were crowded in conditions considered too inhumane for farm animals. I did not expect to see this horror in the middle of bakeries and bookstores, and the juxtaposition of the two scenes was jarring.

While the camp was operational, any passerby could have peered through the wide bars on that infamous gate and seen the starving, suffering, dying prisoners inside. Other than the two-story guard building around the gate, the complex is enclosed by walls or fencing only one story high in most sections.

An even more horrifying detail: Dachau’s crematoria lacked the air control technology present in modern systems, so the nauseatingly sweet odor of burning human flesh would have carried throughout the town. Contemporaneous reports from the Allied troops who liberated the camps describe the smell from the crematoria and the unsanitary conditions of so many prisoners kept in such close quarters as a stench that “covered the entire countryside…for miles around.”

Remember, the smells and sounds from Dachau’s camp did not need to travel for “miles” to reach the residents — only blocks.

As Captain Sol Nichtern, one of the American military officers who was present at the liberation of Dachau observed, the camp was “built right up against the side of the village; the houses go right up to the outer wall.”

There is simply no plausible deniability that the people of Dachau were unaware of what was happening within that camp.

Imagine for me your hometown and picture the street where you lived, where you worked, where you went to school. Think about where your neighborhood grocery store was located, and instead imagine a concentration camp in its place. That’s how centrally located the camp was in Dachau.

The Holocaust was not carried out by just the few names that history has condemned to infamy — the Adolf Hitlers and Hermann Görings and Josef Mengeles.

The genocidal murder of millions was an evil committed by everyday people who filled the countless bureaucratic jobs that kept the trains to the ovens running on time, and an evil condoned by many, many more who were literally neighbors to the atrocities, like in Dachau, people who averted their eyes and held their tongues while millions perished.

They woke up in the morning, walked their children to school, went shopping, attended church services, enjoyed the beautiful Bavarian countryside around them, all the while ignoring the sickly sweet odor permeating the air they breathed, denying the horrors beyond the gate that said Arbeit Macht Frei.

As the well-known quote (apocryphally attributed to Edmund Burke) says, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Evil requires co-conspirators and is nourished by all who condone its presence in silence. This is true for the neighbors ignoring the thousands of bodies burned in Dachau’s crematoria, for those at the U.S. Gymnastics Board and Michigan State University who ignored complaints about Larry Nassar’s abuse of hundreds of young gymnasts for decades, for the members of Congress who authorized hush money settlements to pay off victims of sexual harassment, and for the many in Hollywood who allowed sexual predators like Harvey Weinstein to indulge their sick proclivities as long as everyone was still making millions at the box office.

None of these evils happen — or at least, do not happen for very long — without the support of those who refuse to act to stop them.

That is why it is important to remember what happened at Dachau, and all the other sites where the Nazis’ depraved scheme to eliminate millions of people from the face of the Earth occurred: because it isn’t the Adolf Hitlers who have the power to cause these evils…

…it’s all of us.

The good news is that it is also within our power to prevent it. #NeverAgain.

A version of this article originally appeared in RedState.

The Most Terrible Thing I Saw at Dachau was originally published in Arc Digital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On Friday, President Trump signed the First Step Act into law. Just one day prior, the House of Representatives passed the bill in a sweeping bipartisan vote, while the Senate passed the measure earlier in the week on Tuesday. The bill is noteworthy for the fact that it managed to survive a treacherous political landscape as Congress attempts to wrap up last minute business before the end of the year — and before Democrats take majority power in the House in January.

The First Step Act expands job training, educational opportunities, and reentry transition programs for federal prisoners. Decades of data show that such programs have proven benefits by serving as effective incentives to encourage good behavior from prisoners while incarcerated, and reducing recidivism after they are released.

The other major reforms in the bill relate to federal sentencing laws, including reducing some mandatory minimum sentences, allowing judges more discretion under the so-called “safety valve” during sentencing, and to retroactively apply the reductions to crack cocaine sentences under 2010’s Fair Sentencing Act.

Also among the provisions of the bill are humanitarian issues related to the treatment of prisoners, including banning the shackling of pregnant women while they are giving birth, requiring inmates to be housed within 500 miles of family wherever possible, and mandating the provision of feminine hygiene products for female inmates.

The First Step Act’s reforms are based on successful efforts like those passed in Texas under Gov. Rick Perry (R) starting in 2005. That year, the Texas Legislature was facing a tight budget and a growing prison population. Projected construction and operation costs to expand new prisons was beyond the state’s funds. By increasing funding and support for drug treatment programs, probation monitoring, job training, and other rehabilitative efforts, Texas was able to cancel plans to build new prisons, close several adult and juvenile facilities, save over a billion dollars, all the while significantly reducing recidivism. Importantly, Texas also enjoyed a falling crime rate across the board — including for violent crimes, even though many of the reforms were targeted towards non-violent, low-level, and first-time offenders.

The success in Texas has inspired similar reform efforts in dozens of other states, but progress at the federal level has been slower. The crack-powder cocaine sentencing disparity was addressed, but the original bill was not retroactive, and efforts to address many other areas of sentencing reform stagnated.

This bill has been working its way through Congress in various forms since the Obama administration, originally as the Prison Reform and Redemption Act, then as the First Step Act. A different version without the sentencing reforms passed the House earlier this year, and the bill’s fate in the Senate was far from certain, especially when it drew vocal opposition from several Senators, including Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.).

Cotton was perhaps the most vocal opponent of the bill, writing several columns and frequently taking to Twitter to attack the bill. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a staunch supporter of criminal justice reform as well as one of the most conservative members of Congress, pushed back against Cotton’s arguments in a National Review article.

Cotton, along with Kennedy and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), pushed several amendments to the bill that they presented as in the interest of public safety but supporters of the bill denounced as “poison pills.” I wrote about one of those amendments for Reason earlier this week, noting that these senators were claiming to be acting on conservative principles but were pushing new laws that would constitute federal overreach into an area of law already adequately addressed by the states, with no improvement to public safety.

In the end, the opposition to the bill failed. The Cotton-Kennedy amendments were rejected and the bill went to the floor without being further watered down. The Senate vote was 87–12, and Thursday’s vote in the House was a similarly sweeping bipartisan victory of 358–36. On Friday, the bill was signed into law by President Trump.

Credit where credit is due: Trump, with the encouragement of Jared Kushner and a bipartisan coalition of criminal justice reform advocates, came out publicly in support of the bill and that undoubtedly helped earn additional Republican votes. Among the supporters of the bill: Right on Crime, FreedomWorks, Americans For Tax Reform, Americans for Prosperity, Heritage Action, Families Against Mandatory Minimums, R Street Institute, Cut50, the ACLU, former Obama adviser Van Jones, and Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.

Jason Pye, the Vice President of Legislative Affairs for FreedomWorks, has been a dogged champion for this bill, helping coordinate efforts among various advocacy groups and personally visiting with members of Congress and their staffers. Pye was overjoyed when we spoke on the phone after the bill passed, calling the bill “historic” and “a new chapter on how we approach criminal justice at the federal level.”

Pye noted the more than 30 states that have passed successful reforms, and credited them as inspiration for Congress.

[The previous] state level reforms focused on reducing recidivism and ensuring that the most severe sentences were reserved for violent and repeat offenders. The First Step Act predominately focuses on recidivism reduction, but it also has some modest sentencing reforms that ensure that we are handing down sentences that are just. We still have much more to do. We look forward to continuing to look for ways to successfully reintegrate the formerly incarcerated into society and ensure that they become productive, taxpaying citizens.

Derek Cohen, the director of the Center for Effective Justice and the Right on Crime campaign for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, shared Pye’s enthusiasm for the bill, saying that his organization was “thrilled” to see the bill clear Congress. TPPF is located in Austin, Texas, and has been heavily involved with the reforms in the Lone Star State. Jerry Madden, the former legislator who led the reforms in the Texas House, is an adviser to Right on Crime, and Cohen, along with Marc Levin, Right on Crime’s Vice President of Criminal Justice Policy, are frequently seen testifying before Texas legislative committees to support reform efforts.

“With each successive floor vote, the margin of victory grew,” noted Cohen. “This shows that ‘public safety’ and ‘second chances’ are complimentary—not competing—goals. We can punish justly, efficiently, and humanely, as the experiences of state after state have shown.”

The bill’s passage less than two weeks before the end of the year, and less than a month before Democrats take the reins of power in the House, had its supporters breathing a sigh of relief. Beyond the partisan political distractions that are expected as the 2020 presidential campaign starts to heat up, even though congressional Democrats overwhelmingly voted for the First Step Act and have publicly campaigned on supporting criminal justice reform, there was no guarantee this issue would be a priority for a Pelosi-led House.

Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform and another longtime conservative criminal justice reform advocate, is among those who are skeptical this bill could have survived next year’s Congress.

Norquist credited this bill as “a Republican bill” and noted that “it should’ve passed four years ago but Obama and [former Sen. Democratic Leader Harry] Reid and the Democrats refused to let it come forward lest it interfere with Hillary [Clinton’s presidential] campaign.”

“This is the last wholly sensible bill that will pass for the next two years,” added Norquist. “Anything reasonable promoted by Trump and supported by Republicans will be rejected by the Democrats.” He even predicted that Democrats would refuse to stand next to Trump when the bill is signed.

“We’re entering a period of gridlock, and this bill made it through just as the door was shutting. It’s the last plane to leave Casablanca, the last rowboat rowing away from the Titanic.”

Criminal justice reform advocates are hoping Norquist’s pessimism proves inaccurate. They still hope to tackle civil asset forfeiture (where the government can seize money or property even if you are not convicted—or even charged—with a crime), overcriminalization, and mens rea reform (the legal doctrine regarding the level of intent required for a criminal conviction—as the law becomes increasingly complex and obscure, inadvertent violations are more likely, and good-faith violations can occur).

An earlier version of this article first appeared on RedState.

Criminal Justice Reform Bill Signed By Trump After Clearing Congress In A Sweeping Bipartisan Vote was originally published in Arc Digital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Secretary of Defense James Mattis’ resignation Thursday was a nuclear bomb dropped on an already tumultuous news week, coming a day after President Donald Trump sent shockwaves with his sudden announcement that he was ordering a rapid withdrawal of American forces from Syria.

The Case for America Staying in Syria

The impact of Mattis’ decision may go beyond merely sending the revolving doors of the Trump White House around for yet another spin: Mattis’ resignation letter and the circumstances cited therein have sparked a public rebuke of the president by several prominent Republicans.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has spent the past two years carefully threading the needle—some would say too carefully—in his relationship with the Trump Administration. After a bitterly fought presidential primary race, Rubio managed to negotiate a path of communication and cooperation with the president and has enjoyed substantial influence on foreign policy, beyond what would normally be expected from a single senator, especially one who had been in Washington less than a decade.

Rubio has played a key role in shaping the White House’s policies regarding Latin America, especially in pushing Trump to take more aggressive stances against the Castro regime in Cuba and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, and has served in a quasi-ambassador role, representing the U.S. at the Summit of the Americas held in Peru last April. He has supported Trump’s opposition to the Iran nuclear deal and been a staunch advocate for Israel. Rubio’s Twitter feed alone shows his intense interest in foreign policy issues, frequently commenting on military operations, terrorist activity, political developments, and other news around the world.

The situation has been more delicate when Rubio has disagreed with Trump, as he often has regarding China, and especially Russia. Unlike other congressional Republicans who have publicly criticized Trump, Rubio has thus far been able to avoid the tweeted invective that Trump is wont to swiftly deploy upon his critics.

Several months ago, I asked Rubio how he was able to manage this feat, and his explanation was that his two key tactics were that he did not surprise Trump with his critiques — any publicly tweeted or spoken disagreement by Rubio with the White House had already been discussed, if not with Trump directly, then with a top administration official — and that he kept his remarks focused on facts and policies, not attacking Trump personally.

This tweet and linked op-ed from earlier this month illustrate Rubio’s approach: he is encouraging stronger responses regarding Saudi Arabia’s role in the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the conflict in Yemen, but never mentions Trump by name, or even the White House. Any action he describes using terms like “we” or “the United States.” (e.g., “[T]he United States is right to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for Khashoggi’s barbaric murder.”)

Marco Rubio on Twitter

Foreign policy is complicated because it requires both idealism & realism. As we debate #YemenResolution in Senate I hope we realize that while we must hold #MBS accountable for #KhashoggiMurder we must also deal with what #Iran is doing in #Yemen Read: https://t.co/AeHUASzzCx

The past 48 hours have seen Rubio depart from his normally cautious route regarding public disagreements with Trump.

Wednesday, Rubio reacted to Trump’s announcement that he was ordering the rapid withdrawal of American forces from Syria in a series of increasingly critical statements. Rubio first called the withdrawal a “grave error” and a “terrible mistake,” without naming who exactly was making these grave, terrible errors.

Marco Rubio on Twitter

full and rapid" withdrawal from #Syria is a grave error with broader implications beyond just the fight against #ISIS Too complex to outline why in a tweet. Will speak about this on Facebook Live at 10:45am eastern. Watch here: https://t.co/SN8390EYZe

Marco Rubio on Twitter

Hasty withdrawal from #Syria will cause Kurds & SDF to end fight against ISIS & turns Syria over to Israel's greatest enemies. This is a terrible mistake. It will have grave consequences for the U.S. & Israel & great benefit for ISIS, Iran & Hezbollah https://t.co/ljbwH0kIKO

Rubio then called the withdrawal a “major blunder” and a decision that “was made despite overwhelming military advice against it,” and predicted that, if it were not reversed that it “will haunt this administration and America for years to come.”

Marco Rubio on Twitter

The decision to pull out of Syria was made despite overwhelming military advice against it. It is a major blunder. It it isn't reversed it will haunt this administration & America for years to come.

Then, finally being clear about whose decision this actually was, Rubio tweeted that he would be speaking on the Senate floor “in opposition to the president’s decision to withdraw from Syria.”

Marco Rubio on Twitter

At 6:25pm Eastern Time I will be speaking on the Senate floor in opposition to the President's decision to withdraw from #Syria. Watch Live here: https://t.co/EDsL1LvdP1

When news broke of Mattis’ resignation, Rubio initially posted a very cautious tweet that he “hope[d] his decision to resign was motivated solely by a desire to enjoy a well deserved retirement.” This tweet drew a flood of skeptical, often mocking, reactions.

Marco Rubio on Twitter

Gen.Mattis has served our nation with great distinction. He will not be easy to replace. For the sake of our national security I hope his decision to resign was motivated solely by a desire to enjoy a well deserved retirement.

Less than an hour later, Rubio had seen Mattis’ resignation letter and had his answer. Rubio noted that the letter “makes it abundantly clear that we are headed towards a series of grave policy errors” and expressed his hope that those who had supported the Trump Administration’s initiatives could “persuade the President to choose a different direction.”

Marco Rubio on Twitter

Just read Gen. Mattis resignation letter. It makes it abundantly clear that we are headed towards a series of grave policy errors which will endanger our nation,damage our alliances & empower our adversaries. 1/2

Marco Rubio on Twitter

I hope we who have supported this administrations initiatives over the last two years can persuade the President to choose a different direction. But we must also fulfill our constitutional duty to conduct oversight over the policies of the executive branch. 2/2

Then came what was perhaps the most direct public challenge to the president from Rubio since Trump became president: “But we must also fulfill our constitutional duty to conduct oversight over the policies of the executive branch.” On several occasions in the past Rubio has urged a shift or even reversal of a Trump policy, but this statement contemplates Congress taking action to rein in the White House, something that has been mentioned far more frequently by Democrats — or Republicans on their way out the door, like Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) or Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) — but rarely by Republicans planning to return to their seats in January.

Our Imperial Presidency

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has followed a similarly circumspect path as Rubio in his comments about Trump during the past two years, taking care to often give him credit for their work, describing Senate Republicans’ legislative efforts as “working with the President” or being done “at the request of the President.”

Mattis’ resignation resulted in an about-face by McConnell, who issued a statement via press release Thursday evening reacting to the retired Marine Corps four-star general’s letter. McConnell plainly stated that he is “particularly distressed” Mattis resigned “due to sharp differences with the president” on these foreign policy issues, and urged Trump to nominate a new Secretary of Defense who shares Mattis’ principles:

I believe it’s essential that the United States maintain and strengthen the post-World War II alliances that have been carefully built by leaders in both parties. We must also maintain a clear-eyed understanding of our friends and foes, and recognize that nations like Russia are among the latter.

So I was sorry to learn that Secretary Mattis, who shares those clear principles, will soon depart the Administration. But I am particularly distressed that he is resigning due to sharp differences with the president on these and other key aspects of America’s global leadership.

It is regrettable that the president must now choose a new Secretary of Defense. But I urge him to select a leader who shares Secretary Mattis’s understanding of these vital principles and his total commitment to America’s servicemembers.

As for Trump himself, he was up and tweeting a storm before 7:00 a.m. (EST), vowing a government shutdown if Senate Democrats voted down the continuing resolution containing provisions for funding border security that he wanted. Trump even called out McConnell by name, but only to urge him to fight for funding the wall and other border security efforts.

So far, Trump has not tweeted another word about McConnell, and nothing at all about Rubio or any of the other Republicans who have chastised him for the decision to withdraw from Syria or his role in driving Mattis out of the Department of Defense. Even more notably, Trump has not tweeted about Mattis since his 5:21 p.m. Thursday tweets with the flimsy claim that Mattis was “retiring.” Though the day is still young, it’s already evident there’s a different dynamic at play with Mattis’ departure than when other key figures have left. Rubio’s willingness to more directly characterize Trump’s actions as massively mistaken, and McConnell’s decision to offer far more pointed criticism in addition to a call for Trump to pick someone like Mattis to replace the outgoing general, signal that there is something different about Trump’s actions this time around.

Mattis Resignation Sparks Surprisingly Sharp Criticism of Trump from McConnell, Rubio was originally published in Arc Digital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.