The 1994 Crime Bill has been a talking point for the Sanders campaign for quite some time now, at no point has Sanders claimed any personal responsibility. Sanders voted in favor of the bill which he is attacking others. It’s been an interesting attack, but now we had more details spill out that Sanders had pushed himself as being tough on crime for a long time using the crime bill vote as proof. Most recently, this was uncovered:
Bernie: "..we should be raising the punishment for powder cocaine, not lowering the sentence for crack offenses" https://t.co/K2ig40Eh54
— James Carter (@JECarter4) April 10, 2016
Here is the October 18, 1995 Congressional Record with the excerpt, here is Sanders statement in it’s entirety (with comments):
I am outraged that we are not given the option to support both fairness in our criminal justice system and a strong stance against crime and illegal drugs. The issue here is extremely important. There is no excuse for a young man in the ghetto to be arrested for crack cocaine possession and get 5 years in prison when the more affluent powder cocaine user risks only 1 year in jail. The simple fact is that the poor and the black minority are treated unfairly under current sentencing guidelines.
Right on! Senator Sander’s 1994 crime bill which he voted for included mandatory sentencing, much has been discussed about the impact on communities and race. I’m glad that a few months after his vote in favor of the bill he’s talking about racial inequities. Incarceration rates sky rocked by race and drugs users were treated as criminals rather than a public health issue.
So let them have it Senator:
Don’t get me wrong. This Congressman thinks that drugs are a scourge on America and I strongly believe we must fight cocaine use in any form. We should be addressing the fairness issue by raising the punishment for powder cocaine, not lowering the sentence for crack offenses. I am deeply disturbed that this was not given as an option today.
Wait, what?
You want to keep as you so eloquently put it, the “young man in the ghetto” is prison for 5 years, maintaining the incarceration rate and the War on Drugs, but instead you are upset that we aren’t doing it to enough drug users? That’s what you re upset about?
More Sanders:
I come from an almost all white State and I know that the people of Vermont want tough law enforcement and tough penalties against drug dealers. But they do not believe that a white cocaine user should be treated far more leniently than a black cocaine user. And that is what the issue is here today. The criminal justice system must be fair and unbiased or it is simply not just.
Really, that’s the issue? It does seem like Sanders who voted for the 1994 Crime Bill, doubled down to expand penalties and mandatory minimums and even used the crime bill to boast about his tough on crime bona fides as late as 2006.
Yet, with all his repeated support and talk about strengthening the bill, he used it to attack Bill and Hillary Clinton. Is Clinton free of blame? No, of course not. But do you know what we did get, an acknowledgement of making a mistake and working to make things better. Sanders on the other hand does not own his mistake, he blames others and makes excuses. Sorry, that’s not leadership. It’s time for Bernie Sanders to come clean on his support of the 1994 crime bill and apologize for his error in judgement and talk to us about what he has learned from his mistake.
I’m a bit confused over this.
It’s been reported to death.
The Clinton administration corralled the liberals by moving to combine sweeteners like the Violence Against Women Act and the 10-year assault-weapons ban and the universally popular increase in police funding with bitter pills like mandatory minimums, 3-strikes, etc. Sanders called it a crap bill then, but it was a compromise, and the only way to get the VAWA passed.
But the idea of the bill and its structure was entirely the brainchild of the Clinton Administration, including Hillary. It was pure vote pandering. Part of Clinton’s strategy to capture Republican positions on trade, regulation, etc. Now the election calculus has shifted and surprise, so has Hillary’s rhetoric.
Clinton’s campaign needs to start watching what they say, watching what they do. Or it’ll be President Kasich.
I was hoping Sanders wasn’t that much of a hypocrite.
But I guess he is, in this case. If he thought the bill stunk, he should have voted against it.
Thanks for clarifying this.
and link to “How a Bill Becomes Law.” I’m pretty sure it’s on Youtube, though.
I’m sorry but your candidate seems to be having it both ways.
…of it would be really nice if people remembered the politics of the 1990s. There are things in the bill I would still defend, maybe other things the wisdom of which is now questionable. I don’t think Sanders necessarily needs to apologize for his vote, but I hope he would be honest about his record and the reasons for his vote.
Bernie apologizes for his crime bill vote and then Hillary apologizes for her support of NAFTA, TPP, The Panama Trade Deal, The War in Iraq, Opposition to Health Care as a Human Right (and attacking a fellow Democrat on the topic), her support of DOMA, her opposition to $15 as a national minimum wage, THIS VOTE, and finally, releases the transcripts.
Do we have a deal? If the answer is “YES”, I’ll take a ride over a see Bernie on this.
that Sanders is attacking Clinton regarding the law in question? I could be wrong, but I don’t think you’ve pointed to anything on which Clinton has attacked Sanders where Clinton is “guilty” of the same thing she decries, which as I read it was the point of the post.
Clinton is attacking Sanders for “deregulating Wall St” even though the language for the CFMA was snuck into a bill to fund the government. And who helped sneak it into the bill? Why Gary Gensler, the CFO of Hillary’s campaign, and Bill Clinton.
but Clinton is responsible for every. Thanks for your clarification.
Don’t be butthurt that Hillary is a hypocrite.
I pointed out the flaw in you response. Excuses don’t cut it. I’m not an all in Clinton supporter. So please don’t make up things, to help with your pretend point.
I reject your “deal”. Here’s a counter-offer.
Mr. Sanders and Ms. Clinton each agree that the decisions of 20 years ago are of little relevance to the choices that we face today. They agree that they have substantive differences in how to address the issues that face us today, and they agree to focus their exchanges on those substantive differences. They agree that the pressures that each faced as Senator are very different from the pressures they will face as President.
This was essentially the arrangement between them at the start of the campaign. I would like to see them return to it.
On the one hand, yes, we miss the very different context in which the Clinton Administration took office with rising crime, conservative ascendancy, and liberal retreat. Republicans had occupied the White House for 20 of the previous 24 years. Carter was the sole exception and he was widely regarded as having been a terrible president. Compromises or concessions were made to win the presidency. Quite likely that was better than having the party of Regan, Nixon, and G. W. Bush occupy it those 8 years.
Even so. Decisions 20 years ago tell us something about the people who made those decisions. Evaluating 1996 as if it were 2016 without cellphones is a mistake, but so is forgetting 1996.
I agree that the values of people don’t change a lot. Still, they do change. Are you the same person now that you were twenty years ago? I’m not. There have been times during my life when I supported the death penalty, when I thought privatization was desirable, when I thought a flat tax was best, and so on and so forth. Those are all positions that I oppose now.
LBJ was, like his Southern contemporaries, an avowed segregationist in the early days of his political career. He ultimately transformed civil liberties throughout America with his leadership of landmark civil rights legislation. By the standards of today’s Sander’s campaign, LBJ would have been “unqualified” to hold office because of his early segregationist stances.
This thread is about legislation passed more than twenty years ago. It is about a bill that BOTH Mr. Sanders and Ms. Clinton supported. At that time, Mr. Sanders was a member of the House and Ms. Clinton was First Lady — his position had actual constitutional consequences, while hers did not. And yet today we have Mr. Sanders and his supporters attacking Ms. Clinton because she had the audacity to express her views — and conveniently ignoring his vote in support of the same bill. I see NO benefit accruing from this exchange.
I simply don’t see the value of exchanges like this. I don’t see these exchanges revealing very much about the core values of the participants. Instead, they seem to be wallowing in two decades worth of muck.
it’s time to call a truce. You won’t convince me and vice versa. However I will use the same criteria when it comes to voting in November. I will vote as an individual for the candidate that best represents what needs addressing in this country, and meaningfully so. Right now for me that is Bernie Sanders. You have another choice. That’s our privilege as American voters. Tonight’s debate will test the metal of both these candidates. I hope they each make a good impression in voicing their approaches to government. More importantly I hope they put into action what will heal and advance this country if one of them takes office.
Candidates now run on apologies. The best apology wins.
perhaps if you get Bernie to apologize for his gun vote, opposing same-sex marriage, and release his full tax returns for the last 39 years (to match Clinton’s disclosures), we might be able to make a deal.
BTW, unless the cost of living is the same everywhere (and it isn’t be a long shot), a fixed national minimum wage is not quite the right thing. Also don’t think there is any reason to believe that $15 is the “right” amount – its just a nice round number that is easy for everyone to remember and rally around. It probably would be better policy to set the minimum wage based on local cost-of-living statistics that would include at least housing, food, healthcare and transportation. If the wage is appropriately indexed you would not have to go through these big fights every time you want it changed.
…..Hillary is a damn bit too far from perfect than I am comfortable with, as a progressive Democrat and a laborer.
…but I often get the sense from Sanders supporters that he is and she should be.
Given the chance to vote/support a candidate who supports a $15 minimum wage, health care as a human right, a record of voting against foreign wars of aggression, and without deep ties to Wall Street, who can win in November, I am taking that chance. While Bernie is not perfect he’s did not support NAFTA, TPP, the Panama fiasco, the Iraq War and he does not have deep times to Wall Street. For the life of me I cannot understand the support for Hillary by any laborer or progressive. However, I can fully understand her support by those who, for personal reasons, want to maintain the status quo, keep Wall Street in control, and send the sons and daughters of others to war. I just do not share their perspective.
Clinton has come out AGAINST the TPP in the context of being a candidate for President. Also, if you have been at all paying attention you would know that Wall Street doesn’t want her either.
Clinton has come out AGAINST the TPP in the context of being a candidate for President. She was for it in a previous context. If elected president, we have another “context”, eh? What then? And that’s the problem I have with her. Her positions are constantly changing depending on the “context” as if she has no compass other than her own ambition.
Wall Street does not want her? Yeah, that’s why they are sending her so much in campaign “donations”…….gimme a break. She already said she wants to continue the work of the Obama administration, the administration that proved to be another revolving door between Goldman Sachs, K-Street, and the government. My guess is that she picks Larry Fink as secretary of the treasury. Let the good times roll! (In context)
…was working for a President who wanted it (fine with me, BTW since I trust POTUS and also think it’s fine), but she calls her own shots both as candidate and President. Clinton has mentioned that Obama has taken lots from WS too, but acted against them anyway. They still like the GOP a lot more. I think it’s fine to be constantly re-evaluating the merits, political possibilities, etc. That’s why my choice is about competence rather than an issue checklist.
Honestly. On what central issues has she been rock solid on during her long political life? Marriage Equality? Nope. Health Care as a Human Right? Well, no. Iraq War? Woops. Getting tough on banks? Ask Senator Warren on that one….. I’d say pro-choice and pay equity are about it.
She’s run for office twice and won once.
Bernie on the other hand rock solid on all the aforementioned and a much better “batting average” on winning elections.
…and won twice by my count, but that’s not what I mean by competence. I mean someone who has presidential instincts on day one to keep all the balls in the air. She’s also been solid on expanding access to health care, but your extreme purity on that issue blinds you to that fact. She’s been in public life for decades now so it doesn’t surprise me in the least that she has evolved alot, but so have the people on things like marriage equality. Why should we hold our politicians to higher standards than the rest of us on something like that?
Time to put on the big boy pants. It is not Clinton’s fault that he voted for the crime bill. He voted in favor of it, he needs to reconcile that with his rhetoric and attacks. Period.
Sanders entire campaign is built on nothing, there is nothing behind the curtain, it wasn’t supposed to be a campaign. It was a message campaign, it’s obvious with his stump speech and campaign. There are no solutions. It’s just rhetoric, you are repeating it yourself. I just see this over and over. You are accomplishing nothing, you are working towards nothing, you are proposing nothing.
Sanders entire campaign is a bad version of 6 degrees to Hillary Clinton.
Maybe they need to apologize for not correcting its negative aspects sooner, but the original bill was seen as a top priority by the Black community at the time. Every seems to forget the political context, which was the worst crime wave in American history, or at least since reliable measures of crime began being taken. The Democrats were determined to do something to stop it and passed an omnibus measure with many provisions, mostly good tools to aid police, but it also increased sentences and funding for prisons.
Let’s see how the Black members of Congress voted, shall we? (Order is by seniority, then alphabetical)
Conyers – Nay
Clay – Nay
Stokes – Nay
Dellums – Nay
Rangel – Nay
Collins – Aye
Ford – Aye
Dixon – Aye
Owens – Aye
Towns – Aye
Wheat – Aye
Flake – Aye
Lewis – Nay
Mfume – Aye
Payne – Nay
Washington – No Vote
Collins – Aye
Franks (R) – Nay
Jefferson – Aye
Waters – Nay
Blackwell – Aye
Clayton – Aye
Bishop – Aye
Brown – Aye
Clyburn – Aye
Fields – Aye
Hastings – Aye
Hilliard – Nay
Johnson – Aye
McKinney – Aye
Meek – Aye
Reynolds – Aye
Rush – Aye
Scott – Nay
Tucker – No Vote
Watt – Nay
Wynn – Aye
Thompson – Aye
(Sen.) Moseley-Braun – Aye
Total 25 ayes, 12 nays, 2 NV
Most of the opposition came from Republicans and conservative Democrats, though the nays in that list are among the most liberal of the bunch, so there is some basis for people like Mel Watt, then a Freshman, now Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to say “I told you so”.
I was fairly young at the time (12), but I was paying enough attention to be aware of the climate of fear that existed. California’s “three strikes” law passed by citizen initiative with over 70% in favor. (I remember reading the ballot arguments and hoping to fail since it was so draconian.)
Taking decisions of the past, when the political climate was very different, and judging them by their negative effects two decades later is not a reasonable way to have a policy debate. What are you doing now to end mass incarceration? That’s the question we should be asking. No one is attacking the candidates for supporting the Violence Against Women Act, which was also part of that omnibus package.
On a lighter note, have you guys seen the 1995 movie The American President? A Crime Bill, presumably modeled on the 1994 legislation, is a plot point in that.
The role of legislators, the reason we have them and pay them, is to get stuff right. Even if members of the Black caucus had sponsored this bill, touted it on national television, and embroidered the text of it into their living room rugs, we still expect legislators to be sheepish when confronted with the actual consequences of this bill.
Preventing unintended consequences is a legislator’s job and, if there’s no negative feedback in getting that wrong, we might as well fire the bunch of them and pass legislation by plebiscite.
In my view, things like that crime bill come about as a consequence of a failure to improve things that had long been recognized as a problem. Dem majorities after 1968 went into trench warfare mode, preferring to defend their programs warts and all, rather than trying to improve on them, for fear of the depredations of the minority party. Problems with the old AFDC wefare program were pretty well known as far back as the Moynihan Report, and crime had been a growing issue for decades. You let the political pressure build up like that, and when it breaks, you get a bigger bang than might otherwise have happened.
Everyone here, perhaps because you are all young, forget that Great Society liberalism was dead and discredited by 1990, and had been for quite some time, which is why both Nixon and Reagan were so very successful in their elections. A situation that has not, you might have noticed when counting heads in Congress, changed.
What Clinton did that was great, in my book, was to lance a whole series of festering boils that had completely crippled the Democrats for a generation at that point, in a relatively controlled way. Not always the best outcome, but the best possible outcome under the circumstances. This has enabled Democrats to be at least competitive in the presidential elections since, if not always victorious– something that had previously required the incumbent Republican president to be caught engaging in felonious activity.
I suppose the argument could be made that, having made Washington safe for Democrats again, the Clintons should step aside so that a newly energized liberal Democratic party can move the nation’s political center of gravity back left, and way from the accelerating rightward drift of the last 45 years. But it has been 16 years now, and not much of that has happened. Or attempted, even by the Democratic Congress after 2008. And it doesn’t seem like the Sanders movement is much interested in that, anyway.
…if that many African American members supported it, there’s no way we can pin this on racial motives.
Sanders personal attacks on race using this bill.
However, what if Clarence Thomas supported the bill? Would that be sufficient to say there were no racial motives?
But I don’t understand why we have a habit of excusing Democrats for things based on the “political climate.”
We have SOME influence over that, right?
There’s an op-ed in the Times today arguing that the Black support for the bill was reluctant and while they did want a Crime bill, the CBC had a rather different outcome in mind and was not pleased wit the final measure. It argues they supported it because they felt it was the best they could get and opposition would be counter-productive:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/opinion/did-blacks-really-endorse-the-1994-crime-bill.html
What does Sanders say about this now? Other than her “superpredator” comments, why is he tagging HRC about this?
It strikes me as the height of hypocrisy for a candidate to attack his opponent over a bill he voted for, so I’m sort of assuming that Bernie has a a really good rationale for his attack. If so can someone say what it is?
And if he doesn’t have one … well, I don’t know, what’s going on?
It was concocted as a typical legislative sandwich. It had enticing provisions on the outside with unpalatable ingredients on the inside. It forced legislators into a dilemma. They were compelled whichever side they took into a “When did you stop beating your wife” question. Bernie voted for the bill, but he did raise his reservations. When a cleaner Welfare Reform Bill appeared, his vote indicated his mind on proper solutions to help the poor or who exhibit behavior that conflicts with civil society. He voted nay on the Welfare Reform Act.
Besides, this dust up did not spring from Bernie Sanders. It came from young African American activists who fault Bill Clinton’ for promoting a bill that caused damage to minority communities. Clinton himself admitted he had been a bit short sighted on the bill’s effect.
Trying to turn Bernie into something he isn’t is disconcerting. This candidate was a civil rights activist starting in college. He was a member of CORE, and was way ahead of the nation in supporting minority and women’s rights. He stands strongly for anyone who has to work in this country. His campaign was the first to call for prison reforms.
By that standard, HRC cannot be criticized for the bankruptcy bill.
Also, I don’t understand your last paragraph. Who’s turning Bernie into something? And how?
Bernie has nothing to apologize for. Either way he voted or anyone voted could take criticism. However he supported certain parts of the bill, and was not keen on others.. When did he apologize? When the full story came out about the VA hospital in Phoenix, he said, as Chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee, they had acted soon enough, but then went on with to make changes with Senator McCain to correct a bad situation. His sense of coming up short is very much in tact. Almost all of the time his actions are rooted in improving the nation. He also fought for these things having the whole country in mind. His senior Senator, Pat Leahy, even said that he worked to bring home the bacon while Bernie was more interested in national affairs.
The bottom line here is we support who we support, usually with logic we prefer. Tearing down a candidate is not my style. My vote will be for the person and what their vision is, and how they are going to get there. To see what I mean, another progressive candidate, Shirley Chisholm, explained it all, and it sounded awfully familiar to me.
I agree with you that Mr. Sanders did the best he could reasonably do in his handling of the 1994 crime bill. The point is that the same is true of Ms. Clinton. You write “Almost all of the time his actions are rooted in improving the nation. He also fought for these things having the whole country in mind.” — the same is true of Ms. Clinton.
The point here is that Mr. Sanders and his campaign launched a round of harsh and hypocritical attacks against Ms. Clinton on this matter. They put it on the table, not her. During this time, Ms. Clinton was First Lady — she had no constitutional role, and her opinion carried ZERO legislative weight. Mr. Sanders, on the other hand, was a Representative and ultimately voted IN FAVOR of the bill he now attacks Ms. Clinton for supporting.
Such hypocrisy demeans Mr. Sanders and reminds me of Mr. Gingrich’s similarly harsh attacks on Bill Clinton’s alleged marital infidelity while Mr. Gingrich was himself in the midst of a tawdry affair.
These hypocritical attacks are symptoms of desperation. They persuade me that the personal values that guide Mr. Sanders are no different from, and perhaps even worse than, the moral values that drive any other politician. It takes actual COURAGE — the kind Mr. Sanders claims, and the kind Mr. Sanders harshly attacks Ms. Clinton for lacking — to NOT succumb to such desperation in the final stages of a quixotic primary campaign. I do not see that actual courage in the recent behavior of Mr. Sanders and his campaign.
A politician who grounds his entire public persona on his moral “purity” (which somehow always seems to include rampant homophobia) is extraordinarily vulnerable when it turns out that he is patronizing prostitutes, seducing college-age interns, or soliciting young men in airport restrooms. A politician who places such emphasis on his political purity is similarly vulenerable when it turns out that he, too, solicits money from big donors for party events, votes in favor of legislation that he has previously or subsequently opposed, or changes his stance on particular issues as information about those issues changes.
What I see in Ms. Clinton, meanwhile, is a hard-nosed politician who has ALWAYS said “what you see is what you get”. I see a politician who tirelessly and patiently recounts — over and over — her motivations for saying what she said, the factors that changed her opinion, and the realities that determined her actual votes.
I WANT my elected leaders to do what I see Ms. Clinton doing. I do NOT want them to do what I see Mr. Sanders doing right now.
That is why I voted for Ms. Clinton in our primary, and that is why I look forward to enthusiastically voting for her in the general election.
But once he decides there’s enough good in the bill to vote for it, he really shouldn’t whack her on it.
Most significant legislation is cobbled together with ideas from different sides of the debate with an eye toward building a coalition to get it to pass. This is why years later opposition research can say Senator Jones voted to… when the longer version is that one paragraph in an otherwise great bill might be questionable, but it added a few votes to the yes column. Members of Congress rarely agree with every word in comprehensive legislation, but must assess whether on balance enacting the bill would be better than the status quo.
disconcerting, Donald.
Hillary is getting blamed for things she said over 20 years ago. She’s being blamed for her husband’s actions 20 years ago. Politics and life are complicated. Hillary’s record and character are being oversimplified. (See any comment by JTM). This is putting the shoe on the other foot.
Oh. Wait.