RUSH: Now, the other big achievement today. “A Trump-backed bipartisan criminal justice bill passed the Senate Tuesday night by a margin of 87-12, despite ongoing efforts by Sen. Tom Cotton and other hardline conservatives to sink it. … For years, advocates and lawmakers have worked to reform the federal prison system only to have their efforts fall apart at the last minute.

“But with the help of Jared Kushner in the White House and a bipartisan Senate coalition, the First Step Act” this is prison reform “has made it past the Senate and will now likely become law — impacting thousands of current federal inmates.” Here’s what this bill is gonna do. “Send up to 4,000 prisoners home by increasing the amount of time inmates can cut off of their sentences due to good behavior. Allow more male and female inmates to serve time in house arrest or halfway homes instead of prison cells, with exceptions for high-risk inmates.

“Require that prisoners be placed within 500 miles of family. Outlaw shackling during child birth. Mandate the provision of sanitary napkins and tampons to female inmates.” Wait a minute. What about transgender inmates? What about men who think they’re women and think they have periods — and, by the way, there’s a story (I had it in the Stack yesterday): Men do have periods! ” Oh, yes. Men have periods. May not necessarily involve… Aw, there’s no classy way to describe it. They have psychological periods.

Men have ’em too. Not just women. Just so you know. So now if we’re gonna provide sanitary napkins and tampons to female inmates, what about the transgenders? What about the men who think they’re women? It will “[r]educe the mandatory penalty from life to 25 years for a third conviction of certain drug offenses, and from 25 to 15 years for a second conviction. Prohibit the doubling up, or ‘stacking,’ of mandatory sentences for certain gun and drug offenses. Give judges more discretion in giving less than the mandatory minimum for certain low-level crimes.”

Of course, Michael Flynn is exempted. And it will “[m]ake the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act retroactive, which changed sentencing guidelines to treat offenses involving crack and powder cocaine equally.” That was a… You know who cared about that? (chuckling) The Reverend Jackson and Reverend Sharpton. They have been on this crusade for I don’t know how long, to treat crack and powder cocaine differently. It says here, “This could impact nearly 2,600 federal inmates… This bill would only impact the 180,789 people incarcerated in federal prisons…”

So this bill just sails through, folks. This bill happens. I mean, there is opposition to it, Senator Tom Cotton, and how’s he described here? “Sen. Tom Cotton and other hardline conservatives to sink it.” Yeah. Heartless, mean-spirited, extremist, “hardline conservatives” tried to stop it. Now, you know, for decades everything and everybody in politics has talked about the need for prison reform. It has been something that’s been a cause celebre, but it comes and goes.

It’s not been at the top of people’s lists consistently. This, by the way, is one of the things that Colin Kaepernick was taking a knee for during the national anthem when he was on the San Francisco 49ers. This is one of the things he was protesting. So now nobody needs to kneel anymore. They don’t need to be any protests because we’ve got prison reform. Trump to the rescue. Trump did it! And these people all protesting Trump, they’re all thinking Trump is the bad guy here, and Trump is the president where this finally happens!

There isn’t one politician in this country on the federal level who tried to do anything but stroke their chins about this over the years! Even The One, Barack Hussein O. He didn’t even try to do anything about it seriously. He did not even lift a finger. Hillary Clinton never mentioned it. Yet the Democrats are getting all this credit for having compassion andconcern for the nation’s minorities and the prison community. Yet it’s the Trump administration where something happens. Evil white people! Donald Trump and Jared and Ivanka.

They’re the ones that fix it, and they are still the focus of evil. Nobody else even tried. You know why this bill’s called First Step? Because it’s the first step. It’s the beginning. The Democrats have done nothing on this but talk about it. They’ve done nothing but demand it. Left-wing radical protesters have done nothing but protest over it. Nobody’s ever done anything about it until Trump came along. I think the Democrats secretly are not all that in favor of this.

They can’t say that out loud, but I think that they worry about anything that helps people be less controlled or dependent on government. Socialism. But they have to support this ’cause this is their voter base, they think. Prison community, the felon vote, this is their constituent. They have to act like they like this, but note they never made it happen. But besides all that, how does this happen? How does this happen?

Jared Kushner has been working on this maybe his whole time, maybe the two years Trump’s been in the house working on this. But as far as anybody in the public knows, this has been an effort of the last couple of months. There haven’t been panels of discussion on cable news about it. There hasn’t been one shred of attention paid to this, compared to all of the other issues that cable news orgasms over on a daily basis.

This thing has been under the radar and invisible, ad look how easy it passed — 87 votes in the Senate.