Dem Debate 2, Round 2: Biden Vs. Booker Criminal Justice Boogaloo

 

It took a Republican President to pass criminal justice reform! Obama just wasn’t one to get things done. The economy was down, the stock market struggled and we just didn’t win. You’d be crazy to support one of these loons! #DemDebate

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) August 1, 2019

FoxNews.com reports that

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and former Vice President Joe Biden had a fiery exchange over their records on criminal justice, with the senator accusing the 2020 frontrunner of “dipping into the Kool-Aid.”

During Wednesday night’s Democratic debate, Biden defended his criminal justice reform plan, which Booker had previously called “inadequate.” But the New Jersey senator took things a step further as well, going after the former vice president for his heavy involvement in the 1994 Crime Bill.

“This is one of those instances where the house was set on fire and you claimed responsibility for those laws,” Booker said. “You can’t just now come out with a plan to put out that fire.”

Biden quickly went after Booker’s record as Newark mayor where he “hired Rudy Giuliani’s guy” and “engaged in stop and frisk.”

“You had 75 percent of those stops reviewed as illegal, you found yourself in the situation where three times as many African Americans were caught in that chain and caught up,” Biden hit back, continuing: “the Justice Department came after you  for saying you were engaging in behavior that was inappropriate and nothing happened the entire time you were mayor.”

Booker acknowledged that he “inherited a police department with massive problems,” but quickly returned fire at the former Delaware senator.

“We have a system right now that’s broken and If you want to compare records and I’m shocked that you do, I am happy to do that,” Booker shot back. “Because all the problems that he is talking about that he created, I actually led the bill that got passed into law that reverses the damages that your bills…. that you were bragging calling it the ‘Biden Crime Bill’ up until 2015.”

Biden reiterated his attacks about Booker’s enforcement of “stop and frisk”

“Mr. Vice President, there’s a saying in my community: ‘You’re dipping into the Kool-Aid and you don’t even know the flavor,” Booker shot back, sparking applause.

Booker continued, “You need to come to the city and see the reforms we put in place. The head of the ACLU said that I embraced reform not just in action but in deeds. You are trying to shift the view from what you created. There are people right now in prison for life, for drug offenses because you stood up and used that tough on crime phony rhetoric that got a lot of people elected but destroyed communities like mind. This isn’t about the past. This is about the present, right now.”

Democrats have always had a terrible record in regards to enacting “Criminal Justice Reforms”.

Thomas Frank, a Liberal, wrote an op ed for The Guardian back on April 15, 2016, about the unexpected results of Biden’s 1994 Crime Bill. In the article he wrote that…

…what is most shocking in our current journo-historical understanding of the Clinton years is the idea that the mass imprisonment of people of color was an “unintended consequence” of the 1994 crime bill, to quote the New York Daily News’s paraphrase of Hillary Clinton. This is flatly, glaringly false, as the final, ugly chapter of the crime bill story confirms.

Back in the early 1990s, and although they were chemically almost identical, crack and powder cocaine were regarded very differently by the law. The drug identified with black users (crack) was treated as though it were 100 times as villainous as the same amount of cocaine, a drug popular with affluent professionals. This “now-notorious 100-to-one” sentencing disparity, as the New York Times put it, had been enacted back in 1986, and the 1994 crime law instructed the US Sentencing Commission to study the subject and adjust federal sentencing guidelines as it saw fit.

The Sentencing Commission duly recommended that the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity be abolished, largely because (as their lengthy report on the subject put it) “The 100-to-1 crack cocaine to powder cocaine quantity ratio is a primary cause of the growing disparity between sentences for black and white federal defendants.” By the time their report was released, however, Republicans had gained control of Congress, and they passed a bill explicitly overturning the decision of the Sentencing Commission. (Bernie Sanders, for the record, voted against that bill.)

The bill then went to President Clinton for approval. Shortly before it came to his desk he gave an inspiring speech deploring the mass incarceration of black Americans. “Blacks are right to think something is terribly wrong,” he said on that occasion, “… when there are more African American men in our correction system than in our colleges; when almost one in three African American men, in their twenties, are either in jail, on parole, or otherwise under the supervision of the criminal system. Nearly one in three.”

Two weeks after that speech, however, Clinton blandly affixed his signature to the bill retaining the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity, a disparity that had brought about the lopsided incarceration of black people. Clinton could have vetoed it, but he didn’t. He signed it.

Today we are told that mass incarceration was an “unintended consequence” of Clinton’s deeds.

Uh huh.

The problem for the Democrat Candidates who choose to go after Biden on issues like his Crime Bill, is that most, if not all of them, live in glass houses.

Like Cory Booker, for example.

TheDailyBeast.com reported back in April of 2017 that

Months after he first entered the Senate, the New Jersey comptroller alleged that under Booker’s watch—or, more likely, because he was not watching—corruption ran rampant at a publicly funded water-treatment and reservoir-management agency, where Booker’s former law partner served as counsel. And speaking of his former law career: Despite having resigned from his law firm once entering the mayor’s office, Booker received annual payments until 2011, during which time the firm was profiting handsomely off of Brick City. That would be the Brick City that Booker professed to love with the fire of a thousand suns, but did little to fundamentally change. Murder, violent crime, unemployment, and taxes all rose dramatically under his stewardship.

The Far Left Democrats runing for their party’s Presidential Candidate Nomination all talk a good game when they talk about both “Social” and “Criminal” Justice.

The Democrats, decades after the advent of LBJ’s “Great Society”, naturally assume that they are going to get the majority of black Americans’ votes in every Presidential Election.

They not only expect it, they rely on it.

However, the problem is the fact that Trump has made great inroads into securing some of that “expected” support from Black American Voters.

He is even considering shortening sentences of some non-violent drug offenders.

And, Candace Owens has done a great job of waking black Americans up to the reality of the Democrats’ feigned “benevolence”.

The big problem that the “unintended consequences” of Biden’s 1994 Crime Bill and the other Democrats’ records against crime in their constituencies poses for them is the fact that it shows their hypocrisy.

Just like Biden performing his imitation of a matador and waved the 1994 Crime Bill  on through, allowing “Bubba” to sign it into law, the other Democratic Candidates wave and shake hands with their constituents and then go home to their gated mansions in exclusive communities.

I thought the Democrats were supposed to be the “Party of the Common Man”.

Sheesh.

With “friends” like the Democrats, Black Americans don’t need any enemies.

Until He Comes,

KJ