Democratic 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker said he does not intend to back down from a pattern of political sniping between himself and front-runner Joe Biden.
During an interview with MSNBC from Council Bluffs, Iowa, on Friday, the New Jersey Democrat called campaign attacks made by the former vice president “ridiculous.”
Booker drew ire from Biden’s campaign last week when he called Biden an “architect of mass incarceration” for his involvement in and sponsorship of harsh crime bills of the early 1990s.
Biden, as Senate Judiciary chairman, said in 1992 of a bill he had sponsored, “We do everything but hang people for jaywalking in this bill.” Other bills, which were supported by Biden and introduced at the time, sought lower tolerance for drug offenses, stricter prison sentences, and reinvigorated capital punishment rules.
Biden released a criminal justice reform plan early last week, but it seemed to be “too little too late” for Sen. Booker who has run his presidential campaign on strong criminal justice reform with goals that involve drastically reducing the U.S. prison populations. Booker said last week, “It’s taken Joe Biden years and years until he was running for president to actually say that he made a mistake and there were things in that bill that were extraordinarily bad,” at an NAACP convention in Detroit.
Biden’s campaign responded with a statement that said they would be tough on Booker and his personal record on criminal justice. “In 2007, as Joe Biden was working to eliminate the crack cocaine-powder cocaine sentencing disparity (partially achieved in 2010 by the Obama-Biden administration), Booker was running a police department that was such a civil rights nightmare that the US Department of Justice intervened,” the statement said.
Through the statement, Biden’s campaign said it would not be caught off guard again and that he was ready to “ask hard questions” about Booker’s record.
Booker said on Friday that remarks in the statement were “ridiculous” and that he will always be prepared to “speak truth to power.” Booker further said that Biden should be expected to answer for his past support of tough criminal justice legislation.
