Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) was looking to have a moment reminiscent of the first Democratic debate’s viral exchange between Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-CA) and Joe Biden at the second Democratic debate Wednesday night on an issue he’s been dedicated to his entire career: criminal justice reform.
Ahead of the debate, Booker signaled he planned to attack the former vice president over his role in the 1994 crime bill, which Biden helped write and, as Vox’s German Lopez has reported, experts now see as one of the major contributors to mass incarceration in the 1990s. Booker did indeed attack Biden on the issue, working to — as many of Biden’s other Democratic competitors have — paint the former vice president as out of touch with the Democratic Party due to his past positions.
“Since the 1970s, every crime bill, major and minor, has had his name on it,” Booker said. “And those are your words, not mine. And this is one of those instances where the house was set on fire and you claimed responsibility for those laws. And you can’t just now come out with a plan to put out that fire.”
Biden attempted to inoculate himself from this criticism by highlighting what he thinks about the issue now, arguing he now has a strong criminal justice reform plan and suggesting Booker didn’t do enough to reform Newark, New Jersey’s system when he was mayor of that city.
“There’s a saying in my community that you’re dipping into the Kool-Aid and you don’t even know the flavor,” Booker responded, in probably his most biting line of the whole debate.
“You are trying to shift the view from what you created,” Booker said. “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 mine. This isn’t about the past. This is about the present right now.”
Booker has opposed Biden’s historical position on this issue for some time; he’s introduced legislation to make it easier for people, particularly those older than 50, to get an early release from federal prison and was a lead sponsor of the First Step Act, the criminal justice reform bill passed under Donald Trump that took modest steps to ease mass incarceration.
As Vox’s Matt Yglesias wrote, we shouldn’t put too much stock in the electoral effectiveness of Booker’s exchange with Biden, however. “[Biden’s] support comes from older, working-class Democrats who are generally moderate on social and cultural issues and likely won’t be impressed by the revelation that there’s yet another topic on which progressive activists don’t like Biden,” Yglesias writes.
But Biden, who has been consistently leading the polls ever since he jumped into the race, was pushed into a defensive stance yet again. And this time Booker, who has failed to find a footing in the packed field, walked away as the candidate with the meanest punches.
How the Booker-Biden moment on criminal justice went down
Booker, whose presidential campaign has centered around a robust and aggressive criminal justice platform, has been focusing on Biden’s record on the campaign trail for weeks.
It all goes back to the 1994 crime bill.
Biden defended the law as recently as 2016, saying it “restored American cities” during a period of high crime. But we know that it also led to aggressive policing and harsher prison sentences that disproportionately hurt black and brown communities.
Biden’s strategy to ward off the attacks during the debate were threefold: 1) he tried to position himself with Booker on the issue, 2) he attempted to turn the tables on the New Jersey senator for his time as Newark mayor, questioning why the police force continued to use “stop and frisk” practices, and 3) he used Barack Obama as a shield.
“I think we should work together,” Biden said. “We should change the way we look at prisons. … I know what my plan does, and I think it’s not dissimilar to what the senator said: We should be working together to get things done.”
When Obama cabinet secretary Julián Castro and Harris jumped into the fray to hammer Booker’s point home, Biden retreated behind his closeness with the first black president.
“I find it fascinating, everybody is talking about how terrible I am on these issues,” Biden said. “Barack Obama knew exactly who I was. He had 10 lawyers do a background check and everything about me on civil rights, and he chose me and said it was the best decision he ever made.”
But the other candidates in the race aren’t having it, and Biden’s record on issues that pertain to race has played a significant role in both debates. In June, Harris’s defining moment came when she went after Biden for opposing federally mandated busing to racially integrate schools in the 1970s. Going into Wednesday’s debate, Booker’s campaign said they were looking for a similar moment on Biden’s criminal justice record.
They got it, and a slip of the tongue Booker quickly seized upon.
“The bills that the president — excuse me, the future president, that the senator is talking about, are bills that were passed years ago and passed overwhelming,” Biden said, tripping up over Booker’s title.
And with that Booker’s night was made.
“I’m glad he endorsed my presidency already,” he said.
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