Tag Archives: country

Quote of the Day: "Love, Fidelity, Devotion, Sacrifice and Family"

by Sung70Pxftqvrcj Posted on August 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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This is becoming a favorite prologue to wedding vows across the nation:

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were.

That’s from Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Obergefell vs. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. At the time, Antonin Scalia mocked Kennedy’s writing for its “straining-to-be-memorable passages,” and it turns out he was more right than he knew. Both gay and straight couples around the country have begun incorporating it into their wedding ceremonies:

The night the high court’s ruling was announced, Sandy Queen of Weddings by Sandy called Craig Lamberton and David Ermisch, whose wedding she was performing in Rockville, Md., the next morning. She suggested including Kennedy’s opinion in their ceremony.

The couple immediately agreed. “We thought it was perfect,” said Lamberton, an administrative officer at USAID. He and Ermisch, a cartographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have been together 15 years.

….She isn’t the only one. “Honestly, in the 14 years I’ve been ordained, there has not been a passage that struck a chord as quickly as Justice Kennedy’s statement,” said the Rev. Pamela Brehm of Berks County, Pa. “Perhaps there may never be another quite so touching.”

Who knows? This may just be a passing thing. But if it’s not, Anthony Kennedy could end up as the most famous Supreme Court justice of the early 21st century, quoted in hundreds of marriage ceremonies every day. Kinda nice.

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Quote of the Day: "Love, Fidelity, Devotion, Sacrifice and Family"

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This Is What Would Happen if We Repealed Birthright Citizenship

by CorneliBaeza Posted on August 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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After launching his presidential bid by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” Donald Trump last week unveiled his plan for immigration reform: He’d “take back our country,” as he put it on Fox News, by building a 2,000-mile wall at the southern border. He would deport all undocumented immigrants and defund so-called “sanctuary cities.” He would create criminal penalties for anyone overstaying a visa—roughly 4.4 million people. And notably, he would seek to end the practice of birthright citizenship, which currently allows anyone born in the United States—including the children of undocumented immigrants—to automatically become citizens.

As the New York Times editorial board highlighted, six other Republican candidates have now joined the anti-birthright bandwagon, including Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, and Bobby Jindal. Scott Walker initially said he agreed with Trump but has since changed his mind.

All this has human rights advocates worried. Ending birthright citizenship would result in a flood of newly created stateless children. In the United States, that would quickly become a humanitarian crisis, says David Baluarte, a law professor at Washington and Lee University and the director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic.

Around the world—in countries such as Estonia, Burma, Thailand, Côte d’Ivoire, the Dominican Republic, and many others—some 10 million people are stateless, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. They lack citizenship in the country where they were born, and they have nowhere to go where they can receive legal status. Stateless individuals cannot participate in any political process anywhere. They’re often subject to arbitrary detention. They have limited access to health care and education. They are especially vulnerable to crime and have little legal recourse if they are victimized. They have no economic rights and few job prospects. In extreme cases, as with the Rohingya Muslims of Burma and the Hill Tribe population of Thailand, they’re exposed to increased rates of human trafficking.

Currently, statelessness affects between 4,000 and 6,000 people in the United States, immigrants who either lacked a nationality when they reached the United States or who lost it after arriving. This includes Ethiopians of Eritrean descent, for example, who were stripped of their Ethiopian citizenship after fleeing persecution. It also includes those who fled the former Soviet Union and were left without a nationality after it dissolved. If these migrants are unable to gain asylum in the US, they enter what Baluarte calls the “stateless legal limbo”: They’re ordered to be removed from the country, but because there’s nowhere they can go, they languish for extended periods of time in immigration detention. When they’re released from detention, they exist in a perpetual state of “immigration parole,” Baluarte says. “They’re supposed to leave the country, but they can’t leave the country, because no country in the world wants them. They live under the specter of the ever-looming possibility of being re-detained at the whims of the immigration officials that they’re required to check in with.”

If Trump and other republicans got their way, the number of stateless people born in the United States would skyrocket. Birthright citizenship is “the most important safeguard that any country can have against statelessness,” says Sarnata Reynolds, senior advisor on human rights at Refugees International, because it means that statelessness will always be eliminated within one generation. Without birthright citizenship, the descendants of some undocumented immigrants could be stateless for generations to come. “We could be talking about a situation that affects tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands,” says Baluarte.

He points to an example not far from US soil. The highest court in the Dominican Republic, a country that traditionally had a robust system of birthright citizenship, recently reinterpreted the constitution to retroactively deny citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants. The result? Nationality has been stripped from more than 200,000 people of Haitian descent. On top of that, Haiti’s system of birth records was decimated in the 2010 earthquake, “so they can’t prove their lineage to Haiti either,” says Baluarte. “Upwards of 200,000 people are left stateless in the Dominican Republic.”

How could this play out in the United States? Baluarte points to the large numbers of Haitians in South Florida, as well as immigrants from elsewhere in Latin America, Kenya, and Eastern European nations—some of which have a history of shifting nationality laws, ethnic persecution, and inadequate record keeping. “If someone is never allowed to settle into the community they’re in, it’s hard to get gainful employment, and health problems adequately addressed; it’s difficult to get education,” he says. “They’re particularly vulnerable to arbitrary detention. They’re so limited in how they can move up in society.”

So far, most of the GOP candidates have avoided calling for birthright citizenship to be ended retroactively. But Trump told CNN last week that he doesn’t believe people born in the United States to undocumented immigrants are in fact American citizens. “I don’t think they have American citizenship,” he said. “And if you speak to some very, very good lawyers—and I know some will disagree—but many of them agree with me, and you’re going to find they do not have American citizenship.”

Baluarte warns that would be a disaster. If the children of migrants were not granted citizenship in the US, the problem of statelessness “could spiral out of control,” he says. “It would be a humanitarian crisis within the United States.”

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This Is What Would Happen if We Repealed Birthright Citizenship

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Donald Trump: The 14th Amendment Is Unconstitutional

by EmilyBouton Posted on August 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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After launching his presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” Donald Trump is now following up on his nativist rhetoric by taking aim at the Constitution.

On Tuesday, when Bill O’Reilly challenged the presidential hopeful’s proposal to end birthright citizenship in light of the 14th Amendment, Trump hit back: “Bill, I think you’re wrong about the 14th amendment and frankly the whole thing about anchor babies.”

“I can quote it, you want me to quote you the amendment?” O’Reilly responded. “If you’re born here you’re a citizen. Period!”

But Trump insisted he and his lawyers have found some disturbing holes in the amendment, which unequivocally states that anyone born in the United States is in fact an American citizen.

“What happens is, they’re in Mexico, they’re going to have a baby, they move over here for a couple of days, they have the baby,” Trump said, while trying to break down his legal take. “Bill, lawyers are saying, ‘It’s not going to hold up in court, it’s going to have to be tested.'”

“I don’t think they have American citizenship, and if you speak to some very, very good lawyers, some would disagree,” Trump added. “But many of them agree with me—you’re going to find they do not have American citizenship. We have to start a process where we take back our country. Our country is going to hell. We have to start a process, Bill, where we take back our country.”

O’Reilly pointed out that if Trump wanted to end birthright citizenship he could push for an amendment to the constitution—a position held by the former reality TV show star’s fellow GOP presidential candidate Scott Walker—but in a slight capitulation, Trump acknowledged that that would probably “take too long” and said he’d rather use his potential presidency to “find out whether or not anchor babies are citizens.”

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Donald Trump: The 14th Amendment Is Unconstitutional

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We Are All Fans of Self-Deportation

by MichellQka Posted on August 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ezra Klein has read Donald Trump’s immigration plan and finds it even worse than he expected. I didn’t feel that way: it read to me like a pretty standard right-wing take on illegal immigration, with just a few added Trumpisms (Mexico will pay for the wall, we should force companies to hire Americans, etc.). But two things in Klein’s piece struck me enough to want to comment on them:

The plan would be a disaster for immigrants if enacted. But even if it’s not enacted, the plan is a disaster for the Republican Party, which is somehow going to need to co-opt Trump’s appeal to anti-immigration voters, but absolutely cannot afford to be associated, in the minds of Hispanic voters, with this document.

….When Mitt Romney embraced “self-deportation” in 2012, it was considered an awful mistake….But self-deportation is Trump’s plan, too. And Trump’s insight here is that the best way to drive unauthorized immigrants out of the country isn’t to target them. It’s to target their children and families.

On the first point, I think this ship sailed a long time ago. Maybe the Trump publicity juggernaut will aggravate things further, but I honestly don’t see how the Republican Party could appeal to Hispanics much less than it already does. The anti-immigrant rhetoric from leading Republicans has been relentless for years, and Trump is merely adding one more voice to the chorus. Will Trump’s bluster about making Mexico pay for the wall really make things any worse?

The second point is a little trickier. It’s true that Mitt Romney blew it in 2012 with the infelicitous phrase “self-deportation.” But the uproar that followed elided an important point: every immigration plan involves putting pressure on illegal immigrants in order to motivate them to (a) leave or (b) not come in the first place. There’s a sliding scale of pain involved, and liberals tend to want less while conservatives tend to want more. But both sides make use of it.

The easiest way to think of immigration control is like this:

  1. Figure out how many illegal immigrants you’re willing to tolerate.
  2. Ratchet up the the cost of illegal immigration and ratchet down the cost of legal immigration.
  3. Eventually, you’ll figure out the right combination of costs that gets you to your number.

Nobody talks about immigration like this, but it’s the thought process behind every immigration plan. Both Republicans and Democrats support E-Verify, for example, which makes it harder for immigrants who lack legal documents to get jobs. But what is this, other than a way to use economic pressure to persuade illegal immigrants to go back to Mexico? Likewise, both Democrats and Republicans support border security. Republicans may generally want more of it than Democrats, but Democrats are nonetheless willing to use increased security to raise the cost of crossing the border.

In the end, everyone uses this calculus,1 whether consciously or not. The amount of pressure—or cruelty, if you prefer—that you’re willing to employ depends on just how low a number of illegal immigrants you’re willing to tolerate. But no matter what that number is, if you put any pressure at all on illegal immigrants, you’re exploiting the power of self-deportation. Just don’t say it out loud, OK?

1The exception, I suppose, are the people who advocate completely open borders. But they’re a very tiny minority.

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We Are All Fans of Self-Deportation

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What Happens When a Small City Raises Its Minimum Wage?

by EloisaDesaillly Posted on August 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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When a big city raises its minimum wage to $15 per hour, local businesses probably won’t lose too much business. A few will lose business to online companies, and a few on the border of the city will lose business to competitors right over the city line, but overall losses will probably be modest. It will be a few years until we know for sure, since most cities doing this aren’t phasing in the full $15 rate until 2016 or later.

But what happens if a small city does this? Emeryville is a tiny place nestled in between Oakland and Berkeley that recently raised its minimum wage to $14.44, the highest in the country. Vic Gumper runs a pizza place there:

All workers now earn $15 to $25 an hour as part of an experimental business model that also did away with gratuities and raised prices, making meals at all five locations “sustainably served, really … no tips necessary.”

….Gumper has also earned kudos from patrons for his innovation, but some have recoiled from paying $30 or more for a pizza. He has seen a 25% drop in sales over the last few months and has had to eliminate lunch hours at some locations.

“The necessity of paying people a living wage in the Bay Area is clear, so it’s hard to argue against it, and it’s something I’m really proud to be able to try doing,” he said. “At the same time, I’m terrified of going out of business after 18 years.”

Obviously this wouldn’t be a problem if the national minimum wage went up—though robots might be—but it’s a problem in Emeryville even though its neighboring cities also have pretty high minimum wages.

I don’t have any conclusions to offer here. This is just raw data. We’ll be getting a lot more like this as additional cities join the $15 club and economists eagerly collect data to see what happens. In the meantime, anecdotes like this are all we have.

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What Happens When a Small City Raises Its Minimum Wage?

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Labor Shortage? Have You Tried Paying More?

by HuldaC56ykc Posted on August 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post informs us today of yet another looming labor shortage:

There’s a growing problem that chefs and restaurateurs are talking about more these days.

Good cooks are getting harder to come by. Not the head kitchen honchos, depicted in Food Network reality shows, who fine-tune menus, and orchestrate the dinner rush, but the men and women who are fresh out of culinary school and eager to earn their chops. The shortage of able kitchen hands is affecting chefs in Chicago….It’s an issue in New York as well….And it extends to restaurants out West, where a similar pinch is being felt. Seattle is coping with the same dilemma. San Francisco, too.

….One of the clearest obstacles to hiring a good cook, let alone someone willing to work the kitchen these days, is that living in this country’s biggest cities is increasingly unaffordable. In New York, for instance, where an average cook can expect to make somewhere between $10 and $12 per hour….

Let’s just stop right there. We’ve seen this movie before. What’s really happening, apparently, is that there’s a shortage of skilled people willing to work lousy hours and face long commutes in return for $10 to $12 per hour.

Offer them, say, $15 per hour, and who knows? Maybe there are plenty of good entry-level cooks available. This would raise your total cost of running the restaurant by, oh, 2 percent or so,1 but it’s not like restaurants are competing with China. They’re competing with other restaurants nearby that have the same problem. If the price of a good cook is going up, it’s going to affect everyone.

I tire of reading stories like this. Tell me what happens when employers offer more money. If they still can’t find qualified workers, then maybe there’s a real problem. If they haven’t even tried it, then maybe the problem isn’t quite as dire as they’re making it out to be.

1Back-of-envelope guess based on kitchen labor cost of 15 percent and entry-level cooks making up maybe a third of that. If 5 percent of your cost base gets a 30-40 percent raise, that’s about a 2 percent total increase.

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Labor Shortage? Have You Tried Paying More?

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The Brownback Crash Continues in Kansas

by ChristeP38 Posted on August 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Menzie Chinn updates us today on how things are going in Sam Brownback’s Kansas. Answer: not so good. The chart on the right compares Kansas to the rest of the country using coincident indexes, an aggregate measure of economic performance tracked monthly by the Philadelphia Fed. It consists of the following four measures:

Nonfarm payroll employment
Average hours worked in manufacturing
Unemployment rate
Wage and salary disbursements deflated by the consumer price index

The index is set to 100 at the beginning of 2011, when Gov. Brownback took office. Brownback instituted an aggressive program of tax cuts and budget reductions, promising that this supply-side intervention would supercharge the state’s economy. But the reality has been rather different. Kansas has underperformed the US economy ever since Brownback was elected.

Why is that? Is the Fed using the wrong employment data? Chinn says no: “The decline shows up regardless of whether employment is measured using the establishment or household surveys.” Is it the weather? “Drought does not seem to be an explanation to me.” How about the poor performance of the aircraft industry? “Evidence from employment data is not supportive of this thesis.”

So what is it? “I would argue much of the downturn especially post January 2013 is self-inflicted, due to the fiscal policies implemented.” Surprise! I wonder if Kansans will ever figure this out?

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The Brownback Crash Continues in Kansas

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Donald Trump, the Tea Party, and Political Correctness Have All Collided in 2015

by KarolinBradbury Posted on August 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Aside from conservatism (duh), Alan Abramowitz says the strongest predictor of support for the Tea Party is racial hostility. Paul Krugman says he thinks Donald Trump supporters are basically just tea partiers. Put these together and you get this:

So maybe Trump’s base is angry, fairly affluent white racists — sort of like The Donald himself, only not as rich? And maybe they’re not being hoodwinked?

Now, you might ask why angry racists are busting out of the channels the GOP constructed to direct their rage. But there, surely, we have to take account of two things: the real changes in America, which is becoming more socially and culturally diverse, plus the Fox News effect, which has created an angry white guy feedback loop.

Maybe. Here’s a data point in favor of Krugman’s thesis: the rapturous response Trump gets whenever he says he has no time for political correctness. It was one of the biggest applause lines he got in Thursday’s debate. And while there are legitimate complaints to be had about some of the more extreme versions of language policing, for most people their real issue with it is that it forbids them from delivering casual slurs—that everyone knows are true—about blacks or women or Muslims or gays or whatever. They’ve been doing it all their lives, and they think it’s ridiculous that they have to watch themselves in public lest someone think they’re racists. Trump appeals to that sentiment.

I should add that this is entirely consistent with the notion that Trump’s strength comes fundamentally from his appeal to the conservative culture of grievance and resentment. After all, what are tea partiers so resentful of? Wall Street banks? Maybe, but they sure don’t seem to favor any serious action to rein them in. Corrupt politicians? Could be, but they keep electing them to Congress even if they grumble about it. Middle-class wage stagnation? Probably, but it can’t be too big a deal since they consistently vote for politicians who are dedicated to doing nothing about it.

At a gut level, the answer is that they think “normal” American culture is under attack. Straight, white, Christian men used to run this country and did a pretty good job of it. But now every minority group in the country wants a piece of the pie, and they all blame “white supremacy culture” or “rape culture” or “heteronormative culture” for their problems. And what’s worse, no one is even allowed to tell the truth about what this really means. Mexicans come pouring across the border but you get in trouble for just plainly saying what everyone knows: most of them are criminals and should be sent back. Muslims blow up the World Trade Center, but woe betide anyone who makes the common sense observation that we should keep a close eye on mosques because most of them are terrorist breeding grounds. Blacks commit violent crimes at higher levels than whites, but we all have to pretend this is only because whites have been keeping them down for so long. And if you make a harmless joke about some woman having a great body? It’s a compliment! But the feminazis will be all over you like bees in a hive.

This is what a lot of them resent. It’s even understandable: everyone is uncomfortable being told that something they’re used to doing is now considered insulting. Certainly Donald Trump understands it. When he says America no longer has the luxury of worrying about political correctness, his supporters couldn’t agree more.

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Donald Trump, the Tea Party, and Political Correctness Have All Collided in 2015

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Will Wherevergate Finally Sink Donald Trump?

by JolieH83tru Posted on August 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Our story so far: In Thursday’s debate, Fox host Megyn Kelly asked Donald Trump why he was so fond of insulting women. Trump answered that he had just been kidding around. “I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness,” he said. “And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either.”

That didn’t go over too well, but Trump seemed like he’d probably survive it. Unfortunately, Trump being Trump, he couldn’t leave bad enough alone. In the spin room after the debate he started attacking Kelly and boo-hooing about how she had treated him worse than the other candidates. Then, showing the restraint he’s famous for, he followed this up with a series of increasingly unhinged tweets about Kelly throughout the night and into the early morning. Finally, during a CNN interview on Friday night, he said this:

You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her….wherever.

Let’s call it Wherevergate. This was a pretty obvious allusion to Kelly being unable to control her anger because she was having her period. Then things got weird.

(That’s right. Things weren’t really weird yet. So far this is all pretty normal in Trumpland.)

Anyway, Erick Erickson—tea party activist extraordinaire and founder of the influential RedState blog—got wind of Trump’s “wherever” comment and decided he was unhappy about it. Now, this is weird, because Erickson is not exactly famous for either his restraint or his sympathy for women’s tender feelings. He once called retiring Supreme Court justice David Souter a “goat fucking child molester”; called Michelle Obama a “Marxist harpy wife”; and lashed out at feminists during the 2008 campaign by calling a statement from the New York chapter of NOW the “latest salvo fired from the thighs of ugly nags.”

In other words, Erickson is not the shy and retiring type. But he eventually apologized for those comments and apparently decided to turn over a new leaf. “I’ve definitely had to grow up over time,” he told Howard Kurtz in 2010. So when he heard Trump’s remark about Kelly, he decided enough was enough. If he was going to grow up, then by God, everyone had to grow up. Trump hadn’t, so Erickson called up Trump’s campaign manager late on Friday and disinvited Trump from this weekend’s big RedState shindig in Atlanta. “I think there is a line of decency that even a non-professional politician can cross,” he told the Washington Post. “Suggesting that a female journalist asking you a hostile question is hormone related, I think, is one of those lines.”

Needless to say, The Donald didn’t take this lying down. Erickson’s decision, he said, was “another example of weakness through being politically correct….Blame Erick Erickson, your weak and pathetic leader.” Was that enough? Of course not. “Not only is Erick a total loser,” he said in a statement released Saturday, “he has a history of supporting establishment losers in failed campaigns so it is an honor to be disinvited from his event.”

Oh, and his “wherever” comment? Trump said he was referring to Kelly’s nose. “Only a deviant would think anything else.”

Roger that. So far, Erickson’s acolytes are apparently divided about the whole thing. Some are glad to see Trump’s back, others think Erickson has fallen into the pit of lefty political correctness. Stay tuned for more.

In any case, after all the inflammatory stuff Trump has said over the past couple of months, this appears to be the comment that’s finally going to cause him some real trouble. Go figure. Carly Fiorina immediately tweeted, “Mr Trump: There. Is. No. Excuse.” Lindsey Graham criticized Trump too, while other Republican candidates were more circumspect. So far, anyway. But I suspect this will turn into a feeding frenzy before long. Republicans are still spooked about the whole War on Women thing, and they’re none too happy about Trump taking on a Fox News host either. I think we can expect the Sunday talk shows this week to be all Trump all the time.

So that’s that, though I’m sure this post will be out of date almost as soon as I publish it. I just thought you’d all like to know what had happened while you were snoozing away the weekend.

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Will Wherevergate Finally Sink Donald Trump?

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Before He Was America’s Wacky Uncle, Joe Biden Was a Tough-on-Crime Hardliner

by RuebenDown Posted on August 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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“Hillary and I both feel a special indebtedness for the friendship and the leadership of Joe Biden,” Bill Clinton said during a November 1994 campaign rally in Wilmington, Del., the evening before the midterm elections. “Without him, there would have been no crime bill this year. And because of him, lives will be saved and children will grow up safer and this country will be a less violent place in the years ahead. We are in his great and abiding debt.”

Then-Sen. Joe Biden had scored a career-defining victory that year. After a good deal of twisting the arms of his colleagues, Biden managed to shepherd the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act through the Senate.

Biden’s bill put over 100,000 new cops on the street and spent $9.7 billion on the construction of new prisons. The wide-ranging bill implemented a host of liberal policies, including an assault weapon ban and the Violence Against Women Act. But it also expanded the number of crimes that qualify as death penalty cases, bumped up mandatory minimum sentences, criminalized gang membership, eliminated Pell Grants for inmates, and put in place mandatory drug testing for people on supervised release. States had to implement policies that greatly reduced opportunities for parole in order to qualify for the new prison funding.

Clinton was right that crime rates would soon drop. The exact cause for the nationwide decrease in crime is up for debate. (We at Mother Jones have a favorite theory.) But there’s little question that Biden’s law helped cement the nation’s system of mass incarceration. “We took a shotgun to it and just sent everybody to jail for too long,” Clinton says now of the bill.

Joe Biden is reportedly eyeing a 2016 campaign bid to challenge Hillary Clinton, with a final decision expected early next month. There’s a Draft Biden super-PAC that has been agitating for Joe, pushing him as the more genuine alternative to Clinton, who’s perceived as over-manufactured by poll-driven talking points.

Yet should he enter the race, Biden will face a Democratic electorate that has grown increasingly concerned with mass incarceration and the disparities minorities face in the criminal justice system—particularly when it comes to the mandatory minimums Biden helped augment. The issue has already bedeviled a few of Biden’s potential Democratic opponents, who have struggled to answer questions about race and justice. At the liberal confab Netroots Nation last month, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley were both shouted down by Black Lives Matter protestors who challenged the presidential candidates over whether the could confront structural racism, with both offering answers that didn’t satisfy the activists. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been actively courting Black Lives Matter activists at events and in online postings.

Like many Democrats who served in the 1980s and early 1990s, Biden has a complicated history with the criminal justice system. As crime rates spiked across the country, Democrats adopted a harsh tough-on-crime posture. Yet few pushed the issue quite as hard as Biden. During the 1980s he was a staunch advocate for ramping up the war on drugs. Biden devised the national “drug czar” position and worked alongside Republicans during the Ronald Reagan years to craft oppressive anti-drug laws, including co-sponsoring the law that instituted far longer prison terms for possession of crack cocaine than of powder cocaine. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander called Biden “one of the Senate’s most strident drug warriors.”

“There’s a tendency now to talk about Joe Biden as the sort of affable if inappropriate uncle, as loudmouth and silly,” Naomi Murakawa, author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, said in an interview with The Marshall Project. “But he’s actually done really deeply disturbing, dangerous reforms that have made the criminal justice system more lethal and just bigger.”

Biden’s anti-crime efforts culminated in the massive crime bill he pushed through the Senate in 1994. Crime rates had peaked a few years earlier, and the country was on edge following the Rodney King riots. “It was a time in our criminal justice history that people were very scared,” says Lauren-Brooke Eisen, Senior Counsel at the Brennan Center’s Justice Program. “A lot of this had to do with the media, and fear. But it was a time when there was more violence, there was more crime, and the urban centers were part of this crack epidemic. A lot of people were scared of what was happening. Since then, crime has been cut in half, and at the same time we’ve increased our jails and prisons. We now incarcerate 2.3 million people.”

The crime bill increased mass incarceration by pushing states to keep felons locked away for longer periods of time. In order to receive the law’s funds dedicated to constructing new prisons, states had to adopt truth-in-sentencing laws: policies that reduce options for early parole and generally force inmates to serve at least 85 percent of their original sentences. Before the crime bill, just five states had those strict policies on the books. Within five years of the crime bill, 29 states had adopted truth-in-sentencing provisions. “The country had already been on this trajectory of creating more draconian sentencing policies,” Eisen says. “And then the crime bill was so significant because they incentivized the states to create harsher penalties.” Those harsher penalties led to an explosion in the prison population, which has doubled since the early ’90s.

In addition to keeping people in jail longer, Biden’s crime bill also made it harder for them to reenter society once they were released by ending the Pell Grants that had allowed inmates to receive further education while imprisoned. “All of the research indicates that education increases post-release employment, reduces recidivism, improves reentry outcomes,” Eisen says. “The research is there that cutting Pell Grants for inmates and eliminating this education funding is just not smart policy.”

The vice president’s office didn’t respond to a Mother Jones inquiry on whether Biden regretted any portion of the 1994 crime bill or stood by the full measure.

As Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden has dropped much of the tough-on-crime language. Speaking on Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year, Biden said that cops and minority communities need to bridge their divides. “We need to agree in this nation on two basic statements of truth,” Biden said. “Cops have a right to go home at night to see their families. And two, all minorities, no matter what their neighborhood, have a right to be treated with respect and with dignity. All life matters.” During a police conference later that month in Washington, DC, Biden suggested that tensions between cops and the communities they police had been overblown. “This is not nearly as bad as it has been in the past,” Biden said. “The press exaggerates how far off this is. But we have to nip it in the bud.”

Earlier this year, Biden contributed an essay to a collection titled Solutions: American Leaders Speak Out on Criminal Justice, compiled by the Brennan Center for Justice. The book assembled thoughts on criminal justice from a host of 2016 candidates. Hillary Clinton wrote that the country had “allowed our criminal justice system to get out of balance, and I hope that the tragedies of the last year give us the opportunity to come together as a nation to find our balance again.” Marco Rubio said that the US needs to “reduce the number of crimes.” Rand Paul called for ending mandatory minimums, noting that “our criminal justice system traps nonviolent offenders—disproportionately African-American men—in a cycle of poverty, unemployment, and incarceration.”

Biden? He touted the old community policing policies from his 1994 bill.

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Before He Was America’s Wacky Uncle, Joe Biden Was a Tough-on-Crime Hardliner

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