With Black Unemployment at a record low and more and more black Americans walking away from the Democratic Party, a stark reality has hit these potential voters: The Democratic Party has done absolutely nothing for black America.
I’ll take that back. They have done something.
And, late yesterday, President Trump pointed it out.
FoxNews.com reports that
President Trump late Monday criticized former Vice President Joe Biden, the front-runner among Democrats seeking to unseat Trump in 2020, for his support of a controversial 1994 crime bill, saying he hasn’t “apologized” for supporting it.
Trump tweeted that his own criminal justice reform legislation – The First Step Act – “had tremendous support” and “fixed” problems in the law Biden championed.
Biden, who in the late 1980s became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee as Delaware senator, said at the time his aim was to pass legislation that would combat violent crime.
The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed by then-President Bill Clinton, was seen by many analysts as the culmination of efforts of those like Biden.
However, in the decades that followed, critics blamed the law for an increase in prison populations among other developments.
A 2015 headline in the New York Times, published in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, claimed that Biden’s “role in ’90s crime law could haunt any presidential bid.”
In his tweet Monday, Trump claimed African-Americans “will not be able to vote” for Biden because of his support for the crime bill.
“I, on the other hand, was responsible for criminal justice reform, which had tremendous support, [and] helped fix the bad 1994 bill,” Trump continued.
Trump claimed “anyone associated” with the bill “will not have a chance of being elected.”
He revisited his recent nickname for the former vice president, labeling him “Sleepy Joe Biden” in the tweet.
“That was a dark period in American history,” Trump wrote. “But has Sleepy Joe apologized? No.”
In 2016, Hillary Clinton, then a presidential candidate, apologized for some of the law’s “unintended” consequences but stood by what she called the “positive aspects,” like its efforts to prevent violence against women. Clinton was first lady at the time of the crime bill’s passage.
Biden did not immediately respond to Trump or his tweets.
There’s a good reason why he did not: He cannot defend the results and still be thought of as “Liberal”.
Thomas Frank, a Liberal, wrote an op ed for The Guardian back on April 15, 2016, about the unexpected results of the 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.
By insulting Biden’s involvement in the 1994 Crime Bill, President Trump has hit Biden where it hurts the most: the taken for grated Black Vote.
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.
Candace Owens has done a great job of waking black Americans up to the reality of the Democrats’ feigned “benevolence”.
The other problem that the “unintended consequences” of the 1994 Crime Bill poses for the Democrats is the fact that it shows their hypocrisy.
Instead of fighting against the bill and the “sentencing disparity” which it allowed to continue unabated, Joe performed his imitation of a matador and waved it on through, allowing “Bubba” to sign it into law.
I thought Sleepy Joe was supposed to be a “friend of the common man”.
Sheesh.
With “friends” like “Sleepy Joe” Biden, Black Americans don’t need any enemies.
Until He Comes,
KJ
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