Joe Biden & The Crime Bill Myth

The Russians and Trump will use the 1994 crime bill myth against Joe Biden, just as they did against Hilary Clinton. And we will need to defend him to minimize the suppression of Democratic votes. Fortunately, the facts are completely on our side. Unfortunately, most of them are not well known.

Two sets of facts matter, the facts from 1994 and the facts about who’s behind this myth. I will cover both in a series of posts of which this is the first. For Orientation, here’s the crime-bill myth:

False: Mass incarceration was designed as a substitute for the Jim Crow laws overturned by LBJ’s Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, written primarily by Joe Biden, was perhaps the main driver of the mass incarceration of blacks, and it was done to win over a few racist white voters.

This is a horrible accusation and believing it would make it hard to vote for Biden even with Trump as the alternative. Fortunately, Biden did about the best that could be done give Republican opposition. And the rate of black incarceration, which had been increasing for 20 years, slowed immediately and came to a stop five years later. We’ll get to that after a few posts, but let’s start at the beginning.

From Chapter 6: The Crime Bill Myth

Ricky Ray Rector was a brain-damaged killer who barely knew his own identity, let alone the fate that awaited him. At his last meal, he saved his pecan pie to eat the next morning. Just weeks before the critical New Hampshire primary, Bill Clinton proved his toughness on crime by flying back to Arkansas to oversee that execution.

Michelle Alexander used this pithy anecdote to introduce Bill Clinton in her famous 2010 book, The New Jim Crow. She used it again in 2016 to condemn both Clintons in her widely distributed article, “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote.” The radical left has deceived Democrats into believing their party is responsible for mass incarceration. This is a mythology trap, the third and most complex kind of Political Trap.

My hope is that seeing how this particular political mythology trap works and where it came from will free us from its grip and somewhat immunize us against similar deceptions. I also hope that learning that our Democratic leaders are good-hearted and not worse than the Klan (as some portray them) will restore some of the unity we need to fend off Trump.

Back to Ricky Ray Rector. Researching the 1994 crime bill, I’d come across variations of Alexander’s damning anecdote a dozen times, and I just could not understand why Clinton did not pardon a man who had no real concept of what he was doing. It sounded completely heartless (as it was intended to). So I looked up the Ricky Ray Rector story. It only took a minute and changed my understanding of the situation forever. The facts also provide a good example of how the radical-left mythology traps are produced.

In 1981, Rector and friends drove to a dance hall. When one of them couldn’t pay the $3 cover charge, Rector pulled out a .38-caliber pistol and shot the place up, wounding two and killing another. Three days later, he agreed to surrender, but only to the well-liked Officer Robert Martin, whom he had known since childhood. Rector arrived at his mother’s house, greeted Officer Martin, waited until the officer turned his back, and shot him dead. Rector then walked out and shot himself in the head, resulting only in a frontal lobotomy, not in his intended suicide.

Rector himself had chosen death but missed and accidentally condemned himself to a life of terrifying hallucinations.

At that time, almost 80% of the country was in favor of the death penalty for murder. I’d guess that for a double murder that included shooting one of the community’s best-liked police officers in the back, the percentage would have been closer to 95%, especially in Arkansas. Had Clinton pardoned Rector, Clinton would have had no chance of being elected president. Instead, he would have cemented the Democrats’ undeserved reputation for favoring criminals over the general public.

Considering that Michelle Alexander is a highly acclaimed legal scholar and that this is one of her prized anecdotes, Rector’s back story is a lot to leave out.