Sunrise
Ultimate Member
It's like Joe used to say:
User Clip: Biden 1993 speech
During a 1993 speech pushing the crime bill, Biden warned of 'predators on our streets.'
Transcript:
The consensus is:
A) We must take back the streets. It doesn't matter whether or not the person that is accosting your son or daughter, or my son or daughter, my wife, your husband, my mother, your parents - it doesn't matter whether or not they were deprived as a youth. It doesn't matter whether or not they had no background that would enable them to have, to become, uh, to become, uh, become socialized into the fabric of society. It doesn't matter whether or not they're the victims of society. The end result is they're about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons.
So I don't want to ask, "What made them do this?" They must be taken off the streets! That's number one. There's a consensus on that! The Democratic Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the Democratic President of the United States of America, the Democratic Attorney General, the Republican Leader, the Republican leader of this effort, Senator Hatch, the Republican Senator from Texas, we all agree on that.
Now we can find some “fringe folks” in the study groups on the right wing and left wing, Libertarians and, uh, uh, and “left wingers” in my party who say, "No. That's not what we should do," but politically that consensus has been arrived at. I acknowledge there was not that consensus in the Sixties. There is today.
There's a second thing that we all have agreed upon, and that is:
Unless we do something about that cadre of young people - tens of thousands of them - born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally (I yield myself three more minutes) because they literally have not been socialized. They literally have not had an opportunity. We should focus on them now. Not out of a liberal instinct for love, brother, and humanity - although I think that's a good instinct - but for simple, pragmatic reasons.
If we don't, they will, or a portion of them will, become the predators fifteen years from now - and Madam President, we have predators on our streets, that society has, in fact, in part because of its neglect, created. Again, it does not mean, because we created them, that we somehow forgive them or do not take them out of society to protect my family and yours from them. They are beyond the pale, many of those people, beyond the pale, and it's a sad commentary on society. We have no choice but to take them out of society, and the truth is we don't very well know how to rehabilitate them at that point. That's the sad truth.
You're looking at the "fella" who was one of the primary architects of the Sentencing Commission. You know what the basic premise of the Sentencing Commission is? I know the Presiding Officer knows. It was the first time in eighty years we rejected the notion that the condition of sentencing must be related to how long it would take to rehabilitate. I'm the guy that said, "Rehabilitation. When it occurs we don't understand it and notice it, and when, even when we notice it and we know it occurs, we don't know why." So, you can not make rehabilitation a condition for release.
That's why in our system there's, the federal system, you serve eighty-five percent of your time. I remember what was going on when I was making these arguments in the late Seventies. They used to call it "Biden's 'same time for the same crime' provision".
It's a shame, but we don't know how to rehabilitate, but there is a consensus and I will cease:
A) We must make the streets safer. I don't care why someone is a “mal” factor in society. I don't care why someone is anti-social. I don't care why they become a sociopath. We have an obligation to cordon them off from the rest of society, try to help them, try to change their behavior. That's what we do in this bill, we have drug treatment and we have other treatments to try to deal with it, but they are in jail away from my mother, your husband, our families, but we would be, be, we would be absolutely stupid as a society if we didn't recognize the condition that nurtured those folks still exists, and we must deal with that.
And I think there's a consensus among Republicans on that. All "barbed wire" Republican conservatives who always wanna "hang 'em high", even those folks are saying, "Hey, we've gotta deal with the root cause of this." Not, not "one or the other" but separately. And liberal Democrats who used to say, "Let's look at the sociological underpinnings of why this occurred, and we have to . . ." They're now saying, "Hey look, we've gotta take back the streets. We'll make that fight later."
So, there is a consensus. I hope the remainder of the discussion as we close out the debate on this bill, we can end that old fight. We can put it behind us. Hopefully, we have, as the Senator from West Virginia said, "This is a historic moment on this bill, a consensus being reached." I think that it is, but I think that it's a historic moment for a political reason as well.
Hopefully, we will end the discussion about whether or not Republicans are "neanderthal" and only want to "hang 'em high" and Democrats are "wacko liberals" and only want to look at the causes. those days are gone. Evidence of that: a Democratic Senator from Delaware and a Republican conservative Senator from Utah are united in a “Biden/Hatch Crime Bill” that does all the things that I just said.
So, as my, one of my, relatives who will remain nameless would say, "Godwillin' and the crick not risin'" hopefully we will end this kind of debate and just decide how we're going to deal with the problem from here on. I, uh, I reserve the balance of my time.
