Anti-Tax Grover Norquist Merges With Obama’s Campaign Aide to Push ‘Criminal Justice Reform’

It’s a temporary political marriage arranged by the Koch Brothers.

Grover Norquist, the anti-government head of Americans for Tax Reform, and Stephanie Cutter, President Barack Obama’s former deputy campaign manager, will walk down the aisle in November to jointly speak at a Koch-funded summit on “criminal justice reform.”

The temporary alliance of two fundamentally opposed political operatives was arranged by the wealthy Koch foundation, according to a Koch statement.

“Criminal justice and policing reforms are gaining momentum with concrete gains at the state and federal level,” said the statement. “However, there is much more that needs to be done… We are committed to supporting the best ideas and lending our voice to the national conversation for an advancement in human dignity and greater public safety.”

Cutter made her name as the sharp-elbowed advocate for big-government, big-spending progressive Obama in 2012. Norquist is a long-standing business-backed advocate for lower taxes. “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” Norquist said in 2001.

Together, Cutter and Norquist will give a talk titled, “Advancing Criminal Justice Reform in 2016 and Beyond.”

Democrats and many Republicans have taken up the mantle of sentencing “reform,” which is a political euphemism for reducing the jail sentences of criminals.

According to Families Against Mandatory Minimums, which supports the bipartisan pending Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, the “reform” would:

[A]llow some 6,500 people serving time for crack offenses to seek shorter sentences in line with the new penalties approved by Congress in 2010. It also would replace the mandatory life sentence for a third drug or violent felony with a 25-year term, reduce the mandatory minimum for a second drug or violent felony from 20 to 15 years, reduce the mandatory minimum for gun possession by people with certain criminal records from 15 to 10 years, and reduce the mandatory minimum for people who repeatedly possess guns in the course of drug trafficking from 25 years to 15.

Reducing sentences, however, could save the federal government significant jailhouse costs, according to Families Against Mandatory Minimums.

They were pleased to see Cutter and Norquist partnering to discuss paths forward for sentencing reductions. “Grover has been tireless in fighting waste in other areas of government and we’re glad he’s trained his sights on the criminal justice system,” a spokesman for Families Against Mandatory Minimums told Breitbart News. “He knows our mandatory minimum sentencing laws are a one-size-fits-all failure that couldn’t survive the most rudimentary cost-benefit analysis.”

This bipartisan crusade is perhaps ill-timed: Crime is surging up from its post-1970s decline as Democrats and their media allies continue to push narratives that demonize cops and canonize petty criminals such as Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

Major U.S. cities are experiencing a huge spike in the murder rates, with some seeing 60 to 76 percent more homicides in 2015 than 2014. On top of that, 347,000 criminal illegal aliens remain at large as the Obama administration set loose tens of thousands more onto the streets, while the Obama administration’s allies plan to release 6,000 inmates by November. Of the 6,000, 2,000 are immigrants who committed crimes in the U.S. and are set to be deported back to their home countries.

Email Katie at kmchugh@breitbart.com.