The Case Against Biden | Joe Biden's Politics of Panic

THE FORMER VICE PRESIDENT HAS A LONG HISTORY OF RECKLESS RESPONSES TO THE MENACES DU JOUR.

- JACOB SULLUM

DURING A DEMOCRATIC presidential debate last year, Cory Booker weaponized one of Joe Biden’s proudest accomplishments. The New Jersey senator noted that the former vice president, who represented Delaware in the Senate for 36 years, “has said that, since the 1970s, every major crime bill—every crime bill, major and minor—has had his name on it.”

Said was an understatement. Biden has not just noted his leading role in passing those laws; he has crowed about it repeatedly over the years, throwing it in the face of Republicans who dared to think they could be tougher on crime and fellow Democrats he viewed as too soft. Now here he was, after a notable shift in public opinion about criminal justice issues, bemoaning the excessively, arbitrarily punitive policies he had zealously promoted for decades.

“The house was set on fire, and you claimed responsibility for those laws,” Booker continued. “You can’t just now come out with a plan to put out that fire.”

Biden’s response was telling. Those crime bills, he said, “were passed years ago, and they were passed overwhelmingly.” More recently, he noted, he had tried to ameliorate some of their worst consequences—for example, by sponsoring a 2007 bill that would have eliminated the unjust, irrational sentencing disparity between the smoked and snorted forms of cocaine, which led to strikingly unequal treatment of black and white drug offenders. That gloss brushed over the fact that, just a few years before he entered the 2020 presidential race, Biden was still bragging about the incarceration-expanding Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act—or, as he preferred to call it, “the 1994 Biden Crime Bill.”