When barbaric, demagogic, idiotic, patently unconstitutional proposals emanated from members of the once impotent Republican minority in the House of Representatives, it was no big deal.

But when such proposals spew from the mouth of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the most powerful congressional leader in decades, they must be taken seriously. And one of his latest-a mandatory death penalty for importers of illegal drugs, enforced by mass executions of "27 or 30 or 35 people at a time"-is real cause for alarm. Despite the unlikelihood of any such proposal surviving judicial review, the fact that a savvy (if cynical) politician like Gingrich can predict that it would win popular approval by an 80-20 margin evidences the sad state of the body politic. So the bill that Gingrich plans to introduce in September should not be written off as just another boyish excess.

Here’s how he put his idea at an August 25 fund-raising dinner in Athens, Georgia:

If you import a commercial quantity of illegal drugs into the United States, it is because you have made a personal decision to get rich by destroying our children. I have made the decision that I love our children enough that we will kill you if you do this. The first time we execute 27 or 30 or 35 people at one time, and they go around Columbia and France and Thailand and Mexico, and they say, "Hi, would you like to carry some drugs into the U.S.?" the price of carrying drugs will have gone up dramatically. Perhaps Gingrich would like to commemorate the first of his mass executions by personally bulldozing 30 or so drug mules into a mass grave-sort of a Newt-style ribbon-cutting ceremony.

I happen to know a woman who was once convicted of carrying a "commercial quantity of illegal drugs"-19.6 kilograms (43 pounds) of cocaine and 189 kilograms (416 pounds) of marijuana-into the U.S. She didn’t kill anyone, or hurt anyone, or "get rich by destroying our children." But people like her would apparently be subject to mandatory execution once GAMES (Gingrich’s Atavistic Mass Execution Statute) took effect. And she is not all that atypical of the drug "importers" being crammed into the federal prisons. Here is her story (further detailed in "Ten Years for Two Ounces," The American Lawyer, March 1990).

Susana Sanchez-Robles was born poor 41 years ago in California’s Imperial Valley, near the Mexican border. She has been poor all her life. An American citizen, she speaks no English. She never knew her mother, rarely saw her father, and was raised by a grandmother in Mexicali, just south of the border.

Yearning for "a family of my own," Sanchez-Robles told me through an interpreter, she married a Mexican farm worker when she was 15. They eked out a living as migrants, picking and packing lettuce and the like. He drank too much, started beating her, and left.

Before her arrest six years ago, she was raising five daughters-ages 5 to 19-alone in a two-bedroom apartment in the run-down Imperial Valley town of El Centro, a half-hour drive from Mexicali. She worked about ten months of the year, rising at 3 a.m. for long days in the fields, and drew unemployment when there was no work.

Sanchez-Robles was arrested on June 30, 1989, for the first time in her life, while crossing the border from Mexicali with four of her girls in a van. Border police found the 19.6 kilos of cocaine (worth about $300,000 wholesale) and 189 kilos of marijuana (worth far less) hidden in special compartments inside the van’s roof, floor, and side panels.

Sanchez-Robles insisted passionately that she had just been returning from a taco stand in Mexicali, and had had no idea that drugs were hidden in the van, which was left with her by a man named Armando, whom she had met at a dance in Mexicali. But the jury didn’t believe her, finding that she must have known there were drugs in the van, and convicted her on four cocaine and marijuana trafficking charges.

Even if she did know about the drugs, it seems probable-based on her evident poverty and on the usual parts played by poor Mexican-American women in the border drug trade-that she was a minor cog, perhaps even a first-timer. Somebody else probably loaded the drugs into the van and paid her a couple of hundred dollars to drive it across the border.

Sanchez-Robles was originally sentenced to ten years in prison, without parole, because more than five kilos of cocaine were found in the van. This sentence was required by one of the obscenely excessive mandatory minimum drug-sentencing statutes that Congress has adopted over the past decade, in a vicious spiral of "tough-on-crime" one-upsmanship.

Fortunately, her conviction was reversed on appeal, and on remand the prosecutors-perhaps reluctant to impose such a savage penalty on such a small timer, leaving five children motherless- accepted a plea bargain on lesser charges, and let her out of prison for time served.

But now Newt Gingrich apparently wants to execute people like Susana Sanchez-Robles. And like the poor Nigerian "swallowers" who get caught coming off airplanes with drug-filled balloons in their stomachs. And like the punk kids who cart cocaine into Miami on planes and boats, and thousands of other drug mules.

Gingrich’s press office says that no specific legislative proposal has yet been drafted. But the speaker’s public remarks make it clear that he’s not talking about killing just the kingpins of international drug cartels. (Indeed, any chance of ever getting these criminals extradited to the United States would evaporate if they faced the death penalty.) Gingrich is talking about killing "27 or 30 or 35 people at one time" for "carry[ing] some drugs into the U.S." These are the mules-among the lowest functionaries in the drug trade.

And he’s talking about mandatory executions. This apparently means that judges (and juries) would be barred from showing leniency or taking account of mitigating circumstances, as they are under the current mandatory minimum statutes that Gingrich and others have whooped through Congress. Under those statutes, it makes no difference if the defendant previously had a spotless record, or played only a minimal role, or was unaware of the type or quantity of drugs she was hired to carry, or did it just once to raise money for a family emergency.

Gingrich is also talking about expediting executions by cutting off most of the appeals that now lead to invalidation of some 40 percent of all death sentences. His proposal would limit each convicted defendant to one appeal, to be filed within 18 months.

Of course, a mandatory death penalty for drug importation would be patently unconstitutional under major Supreme Court precedents, including Woodson v. North Carolina (1976), which barred mandatory death penalty statutes because they don’t allow for consideration of mitigating evidence and other individual characteristics, and Coker v. Georgia (1977) . which barred the death penalty for rape and suggested that it could be used only to punish murder and other crimes that directly and recklessly cause death.

The current Court seems unlikely to overrule those precedents. But Gingrich may figure that this could change if a Republican (Gingrich?) were to win the presidency in 1996 and had one or two Supreme Court vacancies to fill.

Supporters of proposals like this one-and supporters of the existing federal drug-sentencing statutes-often rely on the fallacy that because illegal drugs sometimes precipitate violence and death ("destroying our children," in Gingrich’s words), drug trafficking is like a violent crime, so even small-time players in drug deals should be punished like violent criminals.

This is about as logical as accusing every grocer who sells cigarettes-which kill a lot more people than illegal drugs-of being a merchant of death. Easily replaceable, individual drug mules have no net impact on the amount of drug-related violence and death. And while drug importation is illegal and reprehensible, it is not always violent.

Indeed, Gingrich himself has belied the notion that drug importation is the moral equivalent of murder by saying, back in July, "Either let’s have a decisive program that has the kind of penalties I am talking about [for importing drugs], or let’s legalize them." Legalize them? Would you legalize murder, robbery, or rape just because the existing penalties are not severe enough to deter many such crimes?

WHY STOP AT MULES?

Tens of thousands of crimes committed in this country every year are more harmful on any sensible moral scale than bringing in a load of drugs. For starters, there are about 25,000 murders and other homicides a year. Then there are the rapes, the maimings, and the nonfatal shootings and stabbings. Some might add sexual harassment to the list. Should we execute Senator Bob Packwood, Newt?

Nor is bringing a load of drugs from Mexico into California any more culpable than, say, moving the same load on to Nevada. If we’re going to execute the international mules, why not execute the interstate, intercity, and intracity mules as well? Why not execute everyone who plays any part in any big drug deal?

So if Gingrich’s proposal were taken to its logical conclusion, we would have several hundred executions every day. It would take more than 50 a day just to kill all the murderers, before we even started in on the rapists and the maimers and the drug dealers.

Gingrich said in July that our inability to dry up the drug supply was "mak[ing] us look pathetic and helpless," and that "I’m sick of being told we don’t know how to do it."

But the simple fact is we don’t. And the Gingrich reaction of seeking to emulate such models of enlightened democracy as Iran, Burma, China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore in executing drug smugglers, and to one-up them by holding mass executions, is the very worst kind of legislation by temper tantrum.