White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki lost her cool during a briefing that was held on Wednesday when a reporter dared to do their job and ask her a tough question about President Joe Biden’s own role in the so-called “systemic racism” that so many liberals allege has infected our country.
According to BizPacReview, the fiery exchange started when Steve Nelson of the New York Post contrasted Biden’s rhetoric concerning the guilty verdict for Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd to his own actions.
“President Biden yesterday, responding to the George Floyd case verdict, said that George Floyd’s death, ‘ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism in the United States.’ But he’s an architect of multiple federal laws in the 1980s and ’90s that disproportionately jailed black people and contributed to what many people see as systemic racism,” Nelson stated.
“Activist Cornell West said that Biden was one of the core architects of mass incarceration. And that quote, ‘I think Biden is going to have to take responsibility and acknowledge the contribution he made to mass incarceration.’ To what extent does President Biden acknowledge his own role in systemic racism? And how does that inform his current policy positions?” He continued.
At first, Psaki decided to play the game.
https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1384941857424265216
“Well, I would say that one of the president’s core objectives is addressing racial injustice in this country not just through his rhetoric, but through his actions,” she responded.
“And what anyone should look to is his advocacy for passing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, for nominating leaders to the Department of Justice to address long-outdated policies,” Psaki went on to say, “and to ask his leadership team here in the White House to prioritize these issues in his presidency, which is current and today and not from 30 years ago.”
Take a look at what she said at the end. Roughly 30 years ago, back in 1994, then Sen. Biden led the charge in drafting and passing the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which is a piece of legislation that sparked the mass incarceration of minorities for non-violent drug related offenses.
Pressing forward, Nelson tried to narrow down the focus of his question by referring to Biden’s advocacy for the aforementioned crime bill.
“Does he believe it’s important to accept his own culpability in setting up a system …,” the New York Post reporter asked Psaki.
If Nelson had been allowed to actually finish asking his question, it likely would have finished with “setting up a system where minorities were incarcerated en masse for non-violent drug crimes?”
But he wasn’t allowed to finish because Psaki cut him off and snapped at him, “I think I’ve answered your question!”
Did she?
“One particularly disastrous provision in the president’s 1994 crime bill led to far tougher punishments being applied to crack cocaine users/dealers than powder cocaine users/dealers, according to Reason magazine,” BPR reports.
“Under the 1986 law, possessing five grams of crack with intent to distribute it triggered the same five-year mandatory minimum sentence as 500 grams of cocaine powder; likewise, the 10-year mandatory minimum required five kilograms of cocaine powder but only 50 grams of crack,” Reason season says in their piece.
The reason this is noteworthy is because the vast majority of crack cocaine offenders happen to be black, whereas those who are guilty of cocaine powder offenses tended to be white.
“Thus, Biden’s crime bill wound up making it so that ‘darker-skinned defendants received substantially heavier penalties than lighter-skinned defendants for essentially the same offenses,’ according to the libertarian magazine,” BPR said.
https://twitter.com/LarryOConnor/status/1323115600856682497
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The Fair Sentencing Act was not rolled back until 2010. Eight years later, President Donald Trump, an individual that Biden himself, along with the propaganda machines known as the media, have desperately attempted to paint up as a racist, took action to make the 2010 policy decision retroactive via the First Step Act.
“The biggest immediate impact of the bill would be felt by nearly 2,600 federal prisoners convicted of crack offenses before 2010. That’s the year Congress, in the so-called Fair Sentencing Act, reduced the huge disparity in punishment between crack cocaine and the powdered form of the drug. The First Step Act would make the reform retroactive,” as reported by The Marshall Project mere days before the First Step Act’s was signed.
“Those eligible would still have to petition for release and go before a judge in a process that also involves input from prosecutors. With crack’s prevalence in many black neighborhoods in the 1980s, the crack penalty hit African Americans much harder than white powder cocaine users. That disparity has been a major example of the racial imbalance in the criminal justice system,” the report continued.
https://twitter.com/cvpayne/status/1092887954274562048
Guess Biden’s record answers Nelson’s question better than Psaki did.
The Democrat Party has a long sordid history with racism. The Black Codes and Jim Crow were standard operating procedure for them. Maybe that is what drew Biden to the Democrat Party 50 years ago.
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