AP News: Bluegrass Blitz: How McConnell was sold on sentencing reform
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“We’d get into meetings and no one was thinking about the leader, and to me, that’s the goal line,” said Holly Harris, the director of the advocacy group Justice Action Network and a former Kentucky Republican Party official. “So we started working on voices that would be most impactful to the leader and going to places where he would notice us.”
Harris, who lives in Kentucky, enlisted the White House and other groups across the state to get McConnell’s attention at home as President Donald Trump and other Republican supporters in Washington pushed him to bring the bill up. McConnell doesn’t like to divide his caucus, and he had been hesitant to put the legislation on the floor, as a handful of Republicans were saying the bill was too soft on some criminals.
“It was critical that he understand both the policy value of criminal justice reform and also the political,” Harris said of McConnell, who is up for re-election in 2020.