President Donald Trump went after former Vice President Joe Biden, the front runner in the 2020 Democratic primary, for his role in the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.
Biden wrote the bill when he served as a senator from Delaware and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Trump may have a point because the law eventually fell out of favor with people on both sides since “critics said it caused prison populations to swell and resulted in the mass incarceration of African Americans on drug charges.”
You know what’s weird? Publications said the exact same thing about Hillary Clinton in 2016 since President Bill Clinton signed the bill into law.
The left cannot go after Trump for his remarks because The New York Times published an article in 2015 titled Joe Biden’s Role in ’90s Crime Law Could Haunt Any Presidential Bid and the author Nicholas Fandos wrote with the same sentiment as Trump’s tweets.
After all, Fandos pointed out that Hillary and her husband President Bill Clinton addressed the issue almost right away. Hillary spoke about the bill “in her first major policy speech as a candidate in April” 2015 during protests and riots in Baltimore, MD. She insisted that they need “to overhaul an ‘out-of-balance’ criminal justice system and end ‘the era of mass incarceration.'”
Bill told the NAACP convention in July 2015 that he “signed a bill that made the problem worse” and he wanted “to admit it.”
Granted, the publication may have gone with this angle because it wanted to dissuade people from running against Hillary Clinton or supporting those who did run against her. Something tells me the left will change its tune.
OH WAIT! Even The Atlantic published a piece in 2016 that basically said the same thing as Trump (emphasis mine):
What candidates name themselves is generally believed to be important. Many Sanders supporters, for instance, correctly point out that Clinton handprints are all over America’s sprawling carceral state. I agree with them and have said so at length. Voters, and black voters particularly, should never forget that Bill Clinton passed arguably the most immoral “anti-crime” bill in American history, and that Hillary Clinton aided its passage through her invocation of the super-predator myth. A defense of Clinton rooted in the claim that “Jeb Bush held the same position” would not be exculpatory. (“Law and order conservative embraces law and order” would surprise no one.) That is because the anger over the Clintons’ actions isn’t simply based on their having been wrong, but on their craven embrace of law and order Republicanism in the Democratic Party’s name.
Yes, Hillary Clinton coined the term “super predator” in the 1990s. From The Guardian:
When a young black woman confronted Hillary Clinton at a fundraiser over Clinton’s description of young offenders in the 1990s as “super predators” that needed to be brought “to heel”, it was an educational moment for a new generation of voters who may have been unaware of the Clintons’ complicated history with African Americans.The discourse of “super predators” was not an unfortunate misstatement; it was a racist, political calculation intended to publicly demonstrate a lack of sympathy for black people and support for a regime of punishment and retribution.The folklore of the black middle class, combined with the electoral needs of the Democratic party, has worked to recast the 1990s as a happy time of low unemployment when Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton the ‘first black president’. What has been left out of the happy tale is the way Clinton used poor and working-class black people as political grist to rebuild an electoral coalition of old Reagan Democrats and moderate white Republicans.
Hillary expressed regret over her comment in 2016 after a black queer activist named Ashley Williams with #BlackLivesMatter confronted her at a fundraiser. From The Washington Post:
Williams addressed Clinton, asking whether Clinton would “apologize to black people for mass incarceration.”Williams added, “I’m not a super predator, Hillary Clinton.”Clinton first told Williams, “we’ll talk about it,” but grew irritated as Williams continued to speak.“Do you want to hear the facts, or do you just want to talk?” Clinton asked sharply.Off camera, guests at the fundraiser, apparently held in a private home, can be heard saying “shhhhh,” which then turns to such comments as “this is inappropriate,” and “you’re being rude.”—“You know what? Nobody’s ever asked me before. You’re the first person to do that, and I’m happy to address it,” Clinton said, but did not elaborate.In a written response to The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart on the issue Thursday, Clinton said: “Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today.””My life’s work has been about lifting up children and young people who’ve been let down by the system or by society, kids who never got the chance they deserved,” Clinton continued in the statement. “And unfortunately today, there are way too many of those kids, especially in African-American communities. We haven’t done right by them. We need to. We need to end the school to prison pipeline and replace it with a cradle-to-college pipeline.”
Williams told WaPo that she wanted Hillary to apologize “for the ‘damage that she’s done to black communities.'”
So will the left publish more articles about Biden and his 1994 crime bill, especially since he is still defending his actions? I highly doubt it. I’ll look around and see if the left has attacked Trump over his remarks.
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