It was once said that France’s Bourbon monarchs had remembered everything and learned nothing from their inglorious past. So it is, apparently, with ‘Jailhouse Jim’ Sensenbrenner (R-Wis), an individual who is, most dispiritingly, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and , it seems, a legislator who seems to have learned nothing from the cruel fiasco of the war on drugs’ addiction to mandatory minimum sentencing.

According to Families Against Mandatory Minimums (Reason reports), some new legislation that he is pushing would (1) make the sentencing guidelines mandatory again, forbidding downward departures in almost all cases; (2) virtually eliminate the “safety valve” provision for low-level, nonviolent drug offenders; (3) create a three-year mandatory minimum for parents who see or hear about drug dealing targeting or near their children and fail to report it; (4) create a 10-year mandatory minimum for parents who sell drugs when their children are nearby; and (5) increase the mandatory minimum for selling drugs in “drug-free zones,” which in practice cover almost anywhere within many cities, to five years.

Needless to say, this piece of savagery is dressed up as being ‘for the children’.

Now, of course, children should not be taking illicit substances, but, as the history of the ‘war on drugs’ makes all too clear this pointless exercise in cruelty will achieve nothing other than the destruction of yet more lives, families and futures.

And all on our dime too. Charming.

Say it ain’t so, Jim.