(CNN)A phenomenal thing has happened in Washington: Progressive advocates and conservative forces have united around legislative action supported by the strong majority of the American people. Groups as disparate as the Center for American Progress and ACLU on the left and the Koch Brothers on the right; Republican Sen. Rand Paul and Democratic Sen. Cory Booker; and over two-thirds of the American people all support major overhauls to America's criminal justice system. As do, presumably, the 2.2 million Americans ensnared in our nation's costly and counterproductive current prison system. So what's stopping reform? One man: Chuck Grassley. Grassley is the senior Republican senator from Iowa. He was first elected to Congress in 1975, serving first in the House of Representatives before going to the Senate in 1981. That means Grassley's been in Congress long enough to have been there when the idea of mandatory minimum sentences for federal criminal convictions was first introduced. In the 1980s, Congress passed so-called "mandatory minimums" as part of the national war on drugs, supposedly to make it easier to keep traffickers and kingpins locked up.
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Left and right have united against harsh U.S. minimum sentences
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Sally Kohn: Will Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley block reform?
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But a new study confirms that @placeholder's drop in crime had very little, if anything, to do with mandatory sentencing laws and the increase in incarceration.
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One out of every 100 adult @placeholder is in prison or jail.
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In @placeholder's world, the war on drugs is working and mandatory minimum laws are a tool for combating liberal activist judges.
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Over 2 million Americans may continue to waste away in our bloated and broken prison system, and more will probably join them, merely because the way @placeholder does business gives so much power to committee chairs such as Grassley.
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Until there's a way around that, @placeholder will seem broken, too.