Ronald Weich

Ethics Reform and FISA

As chief counsel for the majority leader, Weich was a principal author of many major pieces of legislation. He was "one of the principal draftsmen and strategists" behind the ethics reform law that passed when Democrats retook the majority in 2007, limiting the gifts members of Congress and staffers could receive from lobbyists and requiring senators to wait two years after they retired before lobbying Congress. It was called the biggest ethics reform in decades.

Weich also led negotiations on the Foreign Intelligence Security Amendments Act of 2008, a compromise that granted immunity to telecommunications companies that had provided information in the wake of 9/11 to the National Security Agency to wiretap U.S. citizens without warrants. He also helped draft the Innocence Protection Act, which expanded access to DNA testing for death-row inmates and advocated for change in the way defense counsel was appointed in capital cases.

Weich handled judicial confirmations for Reid, which were often contentious under President George W. Bush. He was part of the debate that nearly resulted in the "nuclear option," which would have changed the rules of Senate procedure to get the nominees confirmed, before the "Gang of 14" senators stepped in with a compromise.

Zuckerman Spaeder

As a partner at Zuckerman Spaeder, Weich worked as a lobbyist for a dozen organizations, including the Oneida Indian Nation of New York, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Psychological Society, the National Pawnbrokers Association and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Sentencing and Mandatory Minimums

While with the U.S. Sentencing Commission, Weich represented the commission in federal court against challenges to the constitutionality of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 , which created the sentencing commission.

But in an article for the Federal Sentencing Reporter, Weich called the sentencing commission "the Rodney Dangerfield of federal agencies: despised by judges, sneered at by scholars, ignored by the Justice Department, it's guidelines circumvented by practitioners and routinely lambasted in the press."

Weich has consistently argued against mandatory minimums, which take leeway away from judges in sentencing decisions and require certain sentencing for certain crimes. Mandatory minimums "undermine this commission's work," he said, speaking on behalf of the American Bar Association in front of the U.S. Sentencing Commission in 2002. Mandatory minimums were created to avoid racial discrimination, but in his 2002 testimony, Weich argued that mandatory minimums cause "unwarranted racial disparity" and are needlessly complex. He urged Congress to move away from mandatory minimums in favor of federal sentencing guidelines, which are created by the commission using a complicated rubric and give judges some room to modify sentences within the guidelines depending on the circumstances.

"States have been enacting reforms to give judges more discretion so the punishment fits the crime," Weich said in 2003 while he was with Zuckerman Spaeder. "But on the federal level, Congress has been taking away judges' discretion by creating mandatory minimum sentences and making the guidelines more rigid."

Weich's wife, Julie Stewart, is president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a non-profit that focuses on public education about the topic of judicial discretion at sentencing.

Show less