Congress has lots of unfinished business. One important item is prison and sentencing reform. The House of Representatives has already passed the First Step Act. It is time for the Senate to do the same.

Recently I had Rebecca Hagelin on the Point of View radio program to talk about her commentary on “Our Failing Prisons and Faulty War on Drugs.” A few months ago, I had Star Parker on to talk about the same legislation. These women will admit that they have been known as being “tough on crime.” Both of them also realize that locking up parents of kids for years for nonviolent drug offenses is doing more damage to society than good.

Our current federal laws require mandatory sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. Often the people we throw into prison for two decades are low level dealers not the drug kingpins we really need to get off the streets. Sadly, they received little or no vocational training and little in the way of drug rehabilitation. No wonder the recidivism rate in America is so high.

President Trump has made this issue one of his important issues. Jared Kushner has been given the responsibility to push the legislation forward. It passed the House of Representatives back in May with overwhelming bipartisan support. When it reached the Senate Judiciary Committee, senators added some modest, common sense sentencing reform initiatives.

To those who say this is merely an attempt to be weak on crime, Rebecca Hagelin has a response. A very small percentage (14%) of arrests for drug distribution involve major drug traffickers. Most of the arrests (86%) are small-time nonviolent offenders. Many of them are addicts who turned to selling drugs to support their habit. Warehousing them in prison for years at taxpayer expense makes little sense. That’s why it is time for the Senate to vote on this sensible piece of legislation.

In this world of social media, we have come to expect to see outrageous and irresponsible comments on various websites. But we don’t expect to read them in the New York Times. I am talking about the headline, “Transgender Could be Defined Out of Existence By Trump Administration.” This isn’t even close to true. Let me explain.

What started this was the news that the Trump administration was considering returning the understanding of a civil rights statute to its original definition. Unfortunately, in this world of hyperbole and hysteria, that was enough for the article to argue that it would literally “negate the humanity of people.”

Both David French and John Stonestreet have talked about this in their commentaries, so you may have already heard about what is happening. But if you are not familiar with the reasons for this potential policy change, here is the history.

Four years ago, the Obama administration changed the definition of sex in the Title IX sex discrimination statute to encompass transgender orientation. Mind you, this was not done as an act of Congress that rejected previous attempts to amend the statute. So the president used his pen to change it and then send out aggressive mandates. Perhaps the best known was the “Dear Colleague” letter sent to school districts mandating that schools accept a student’s preferred gender identity.

The reaction from the New York Times was to argue that the attempt to return to the original definition of sex was dehumanizing and defining people out of existence. David French’s response was to remind us that transgender people did not flash into existence when the Obama administration changed the definition in Title IX. And they would not flash out of existence if the Trump administration returned to the traditional definition.

We need more rational discussion when evaluating federal policies not all of this hyperbole and hysteria.

Today is Election Day. Normally midterm elections don’t generate as much interest as presidential election years. That is not the case this year. Americans seem to understand that much is at stake in these elections.

How will they turn out? I wrote an article months ago looking at various electoral possibilities and still feel it is a good overview of what will happen today and be reported on tonight. Consider these three scenarios.

Scenario number one is where Republicans keep control of both the House and Senate. A few months ago this seemed unlikely but is still a possibility. If so, the Democrat Party would be very frustrated considering the time and money spent in this election cycle in an effort to win back the House of Representatives. The Republican majority would in this case be very slim and few bold initiatives would probably pass the House, especially if Republicans vote in a timid Speaker of the House.

A more likely scenario is where Democrats are able to get at least 23 seats currently held by Republicans and thereby gain control of the House of Representatives but do not win back the Senate. In this case, Democrats in the various House committees will start investigations of Trump cabinet officers. They will call for hearings and various investigations. They may also begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump.

The House will try to pass some legislation, but a Republican-controlled Senate will not enact it. Therefore, we would probably see even more gridlock in Washington than we have seen in the last two years.

Scenario number three would be where Democrats win control of both the House and the Senate. For the next two years, we would see headline after headline about the conflict between Congress and the President. Moreover, a Senate controlled by Democrats would probably approve very few of President Trump’s judicial appointments.

These three scenarios illustrate why so many commentators believe this election today is so important and will determine America’s future over the next few years.

Tomorrow is the election. You may have already voted, like tens of millions of Americans. But if you haven’t voted, I encourage you to vote because your vote might make the difference.

In the past, many groups circulated articles and e-mails talking about the importance of one vote. In the last few elections, we haven’t needed these reminders because some of the elections in the last few decades provide numerous illustrations.

For example, George W. Bush won the 2000 Presidential election by the slimmest of margins. His election essentially was decided by 537 votes in Florida. He won re-election in the 2004 Presidential election again by very slim margins. He won the 20 electoral votes from the state of Ohio with 50.8 percent of the vote.

Over the years, I have collected some stories of elections that resulted in a tie. You can’t get any closer than that. Consider the story of Penny Pullen in Illinois. A number of years ago, it appeared she lost a primary election by 31 votes. However, there were many irregularities in the ballots. Judge Francis Barth concluded that the election was a draw and ordered a coin toss. She lost the election on a coin toss. Later she found out that many members of her church hadn’t bothered to vote in the primary election and could have made a crucial difference.

In 2006, there was an even more interesting story of an electoral tie. William Crawford and Jean Miller both received an identical number of votes in an election in Ohio. William Crawford was especially upset. You might ask why. Well, it turned out that his two sons failed to vote that day. His son Jim lives across the street from him. His other son Andy is a college student who lives at home with him. Neither took the time to go to the polls.

Would the outcome of these elections be different if a few people in Penny Pullen’s church had bothered to vote or if either of William Crawford’s sons had bothered to vote? Does one vote count? Just ask Penny Pullen or William Crawford.

Most people would expect liberals to be open-minded, and yet they find that they are often the most intolerant. Kim Holmes explores the reasons for this transformation in his new book, The Closing of the Liberal Mind. He was on my radio program to talk about the history of the radical change in mindset and attitude.

Classic American liberalism in this country was based on a belief in liberty. Citizens were to be free from government coercion and thus free to believe something different from an orthodoxy forced on it by the state. They were also free to discuss and debate. And most importantly, was a belief in true tolerance, which accepted the right and freedom of others to believe differently from you. It was a live-and-let-live philosophy. I may disagree with your views but I would defend your right to believe them.

That is not the view of the postmodern left today. They practice the politics of intolerance. They may think they are tolerant, but really live in a world where bigotry and discrimination are allowed against any view that is not politically correct. They are willing to stifle free thought, censor free speech, and use public shaming in order to suppress any idea they do not like.

In his book, he talks about the campus bullies. But we also discussed how this has moved into even the business world. Now we have corporate bullies willing to use economic power to stifle and suppress legislation they abhor.

He says we have a new ruling class that is wealthy, smart, well-connected, and formidable. Although their numbers are small (in the thousands), their influence in the media, in the academy, and in government is significant. They also believe they have the higher truth which is superior to the common wisdom of the day.

We are in a battle with a new kind of liberal mind, and that is why we need to read about The Closing of the Liberal Mind.

You have probably heard comments about certain people living in a bubble. They live in affluent communities cut off from some of the realities that most Americans face. Due to the research by Charles Murray, we can now identify where these bubble communities are located.

In his book, Coming Apart, he argued that a high-IQ, highly educated upper class was formed over the last half century that is disconnected from the culture of mainstream America. Charles Murray put a quiz in his book that PBS decided to post online. More than 47,000 people posted their scores along the zip codes where they lived when they were ten years old.

Charles Murray did an analysis of the quiz data along with other data. Even though this is not a true representative sample of America, it does provide some interesting conclusions. Overall it reinforces our general assumption that many of the leaders in politics, business, and the media grew up (and often still live) in bubble communities.

For example many of the bubbliest zip codes in America are located in New York or California. In New York City they are found in the Upper West Side and the Upper and Lower East Sides in Manhattan. They are also found in Brooklyn and suburbs of New York. California has lots of bubble zip codes in the San Francisco region, in the Silicon Valley, and in Los Angeles region.

We also find lots of bubble zip codes in the Washington, D.C. area, especially in the suburban communities that house many of the politicians, bureaucrats, and other government officials that make policy decisions that affect our everyday lives.

I hope you share my concern that many of the people who have such a significant influence in our daily lives live in a world with a very thick cultural bubble that separates them from the lives of ordinary Americans. This is not a positive demographic trend.