 We have predators on our streets. How can he really be a progressive and want to lock these people up? And I'd say lock the SOBs up. Increase the penalties. Increase them. I would put the son of a gun in jail. Put them to death. Joe Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee in the 2020 election by running as a moderate unifier, hoping to win over voters with the promise of a return to business as usual politics from the pre-Trump era. Consensus is not a weakness. I did it when I was a senator. It's what I did as your vice president to work with Barack Obama as your president. Now we can find some fringe folks, libertarians, and left-wingers in my party who say, no, that's not what we should do. But politically, that consensus has been arrived at. Now the COVID-19 pandemic has led him to rethink his platform of a return to the days of bipartisan consensus, seizing the opportunity to offer bold change on issues like climate change, healthcare, social welfare, and infrastructure. But it's worth remembering that in his 44 years in the Senate and then as Vice President, Biden repeatedly took advantage of moments of crisis to push through policies that have exacerbated some of the most critical problems afflicting American society. The Biden crime bill. Biden crime bill. The Biden crime bill. The Biden crime bill. Hell, we've got crime bills coming out our ears. The President says he wants to wage a war on drugs, but if that's true, what we need is another D-day, not another Vietnam. President Bush did not last out precipitously at Iraq after 9-11. At each pivotal moment, he's chosen a course of moderation and deliberation, and I believe he will continue to do so. Just to set the record straight, almost the same thing that got passed, the Patriot Act, was introduced by me in 1994. I voted for a fence. I voted unlike most Democrats and some of you don't like it. I voted for 700 miles of fence. Four women accused him of inappropriate behavior. Several women have accused Biden of inappropriately touching them in public, and now his campaign is in crisis because of a sexual assault allegation by a former staffer. Another person has come forward to support Tara Reid's allegations against Joe Biden. If they believed Tara Reid, they probably shouldn't vote for me. I wouldn't vote for me if I believed Tara Reid. Women should be believed. But the terrible choice put forth by the two major parties in 2020 isn't just about sexual misconduct or character. Joe Biden's greatest political liability is his legacy as a lawmaker and vice president, a legacy that laid the groundwork for the Trump administration's most draconian policies. I think I'm looking forward to helping on this one too. On crime, drugs, civil liberties, surveillance, immigration and foreign policy, Biden's record serves as a cautionary tale about bipartisanship and bold thinking in response to perceived crises, going all the way back to the 70s. A literal epidemic of rape in this country. Every major crime bill since 1976, every minor crime bill, has had the name of the Democratic Senator from the state of Delaware, Joe Biden. I sat next to Strom Thurman. No, no, no, no, no, no. And became friends with Strom Thurman. Together, we passed a crime bill. So don't tell me you can't work with people and compromise. In the 80s, Biden worked on several bills with the former segregationist that established mandatory minimum sentences, raised maximum sentences, and effectively created the modern system of civil asset forfeiture, which allows authorities to seize the money and property of the accused without charging them with a crime. Where's all this from? The government can take everything you own, everything from your car to your house, your bank account. They can take everything. You got a gun, you commit a felony, 10 years. We already have it five years. Minimum mandatory. Judge can't say, you know, you had it in your pocket. You never intended to use it. We're only going to give you one year. Judge has to say five years. Well, he wants to make it 10 or 20 or 60. We can work that out. He wanted to remove judicial discretion for those who, quote, don't meet the middle class criteria of susceptibility to rehabilitation. They are beyond the pale, many of those people. They literally have not been socialized. 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 street. They are in jail away from my mother. Your husband, our families. The Biden-Therman Violent Crime Control Act of 1991 would have increased the maximum sentence for 44 crimes to include the death penalty. A wag in the newspaper recently wrote, Biden has made it a death penalty offense for everything but jaywalking. Republicans won up Biden by adding 46 capital crimes. I'm going to make it for 46 crimes. Biden says make it for 51. We're going to get tough. So he proposed 53. Then he presented the final version of the legislation. 60 new death penalties, brand new, 60. There are 70 additional enhancements of penalties, i.e. you go to jail, longer. After his disastrous 1987 presidential campaign, Biden had staged his political comeback, in part by becoming a media darling on issues of policing and crime. And he led the fight to pass the landmark 1994 crime bill under Bill Clinton. When I wrote the original bill that started this whole process, the so-called Biden crime bill, I didn't call a liberal comm fab and write it. I didn't call any big society people and write it. I call the cops. A democratic president wants 100. A democratic president. That's the secret that somehow the Republicans tried to make the crime bill tougher. I say poppycock. They didn't make anything tougher. I wrote that bill. He convinced Republicans to support urban community programs as a way to keep inner city kids away from respectable families. They started looking at it and found out that this midnight basketball and get a bunch of giant folks who are black, white, and Hispanic, who live in inner city to do, you know, try to see if they can be Michael Jordan. When they found out, they were keeping schools open, so gangs come off streets instead of out raping my mother, marauding me, robbing the local store. They're in a gymnasium and my daughter will be safer. My wife will be safer. My mother will be safer and I will be safer and I will be happy. Never again should Washington put politics and party above law and order. Along with several laws passed in the 80s, the 1994 crime bill drove up the local, state, and federal prison populations and it tarnished the reputations of Biden and Bill Clinton, who signed it into law. When Biden ran for president in 2008, he told the New York Times that he knew more people would be locked up across the board, but that it would drive down crime. In fact, crime rates were already falling when Biden pushed for the passage of the 94 crime bill and they have continued falling as the prison population has declined in recent years. You ashamed of that bill? Not at all. In fact, I drafted the bill. We had enormous success. The mass incarceration created by Biden's lock him up policies ripped apart vulnerable communities and families for a generation and the federal funding streams and law enforcement infrastructure it created continue to hinder reform efforts. There are things I would change, but by and large, what it really did, it restored American cities. America is under attack, literally under attack by an enemy who is well financed, well supplied and well armed and fully capable of declaring total war against the nation and its people. We have to hold every drug user accountable. In the 1980s and 90s, Biden was a prominent figure in the bipartisan war on drugs. Today, there's a new epidemic, smokable cocaine. This is crack cocaine. It's as innocent looking as candy, but it's turning our cities into battle zones and it's murdering our children. In his first primetime address to the nation from the Oval Office in 1989, President George H.W. Bush announced a major escalation of the drug war. An assault on every front. We need more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors. Quite frankly, the president's plan is not tough enough, bold enough or imaginative enough to meet the crisis at hand. Biden made it clear that Democrats were just as tough on drugs as Republicans. He even suggested that state and local officials eradicate marijuana fields themselves. We're going to have to worry about getting governors to go out in the mountain sides with flamethrowers with you next to them, dealing with it in their backyards. During the period of bloodshed and mayhem of which the president has spoken, we passed a law, bipartisan. We said crack cocaine is such a bad deal that if you find someone with this much of it, a quarter's worth not in value in size. Five years in jail. Biden had cosponsored the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which meted out the same mandatory minimum prison term to someone possessing five grams of crack cocaine as to someone possessing 500 grams of powder cocaine. Five years, no probation, no parole. If you have this much, lock them up and put them in our prison. He continued pushing to create the office of the drug czar after President Ronald Reagan had vetoed his first legislative attempt and advocated locking up young drug offenders in quote military style boot camp prisons. Boot camps for youthful offenders. Under this bill, we can string up barbed wire. We can build quants and huts and we can put them in boot camps. We can do that. In 2002, Biden introduced the Rave Act, or the Reducing Americans Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act. He argued that ecstasy abuse among teenagers was skyrocketing and that it was time to pass legislation he had long planned. I've been fighting to get these club drugs changed in schedule for years. DEA was my opposition. The Rave Act not only increased penalties for drug crimes. It went after anyone who owned the property where people did drugs. That's the scum we should be put in jail. Not just the guy selling the pills. Arrest the promoter. Find a rationale unrelated to drugs. You don't have to get them for drugs. Turn off the water. I put you in jail. I put you in jail. The law expanded authorities power to classify venues as crack houses, a provision that federal prosecutors are now using to stop cities from opening overdose prevention sites. I'm the guy who authored the Crack House legislation. We can use the Crack House legislation to tear down these buildings. You can literally bulldoze down their business. Great big bulldozer just bulldoze it down literally, not figuratively. Biden also lamented not being able to force press outlets to stick to the government's messaging about drugs. Hold our media accountable is something we all desire. But there's a thing called the First Amendment, which is read in a way that I think is a little excessive. In 2008, Biden began to recant on some of his past stances on drugs and crime. As vice president, he pushed for the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced, but did not eliminate the crack cocaine sentencing disparity he had helped usher into law. After 21 years of studying reviews, these facts have convinced me that the 101 disparity cannot be supported. But as Biden prepares to confront new perceived drug crises, where former are still struggling to unwind, many of the consensus policies he has worked to enact in the war on drugs. It was a big mistake when it was made, but it's trapped an entire generation. We disagree with the president's decision to cut the customs service, the Coast Guard and the Border Patrol. We think we should do more to stem the flow of drugs across our borders. In 1996, Biden boasted about the additional resources his crime bill had funneled to border security agencies and argued for sending the military to the Mexican border to deal with drug trafficking. There ain't enough customs agents to collect enough pills. People are driving across that border with funds, funds, here's your funds. It's all coming up to corrupt Mexico. Today, Biden mocks Trump for using the military at the border. He said that calls to build the wall are divorced from reality, and won't stop the flow of illegal narcotics or human smugglers. All the bad things are coming through porch of entry right now. We don't need a wall. But leading up to his 2008 presidential campaign, he said this. I voted for the fence related to drugs. A fence will stop 20 kilos of cocaine coming through that fence. It will not stop someone climbing over and around it. Biden was referring to the 2006 Secure Fence Act signed by George W. Bush, which didn't tamp down the drug trade or border crossings, but did force migrants further into increasingly dangerous routes and remote desert areas, which according to the ACLU contributed to thousands of deaths. President Obama, I think, did a heck of a job to compare him to what this guy's doing is absolutely, I find, close and moral. Biden now condemns the Trump administration's tactics of enforcement and deportation. The most vulnerable, the undocumented, how are we made better or stronger as a nation when immigrant and Latino communities live in a daily terror of an ICE raid on their workplace? This is heartbreaking. Not only heartbreaking, it's the very definition of being counterproductive. But in 1996, he voted for a law that increased detentions and expedited removals for immigration-related offenses, largely creating the current approach. Money, American employers who knowingly violate the law when in fact they hire illegals. During Biden's years as vice president, the federal government took full advantage of the infrastructure and expanded powers the law had established. And the Obama administration deported a record number of people. You called me deported. We lay the groundwork for passing comprehensive immigration reform. It took much too long to get it right. And the president did get it right by DACA, as well as making sure that he tried to protect parents as well. And by the way, moving on an immigration bill as well. But that bill failed, so the best Biden can do today is promise that he won't use the deportation machinery he helped create and that presidents from both major parties have employed during so-called border and immigration crises, at least temporarily. In the first hundred days of my administration, no one, no one will be deported at all. Law enforcement today faces terrorist bombings like we've never seen in our history as a nation. In 1995, Biden had introduced a bill that combined all of his ideas for growing the surveillance state. Civil libertarians were opposed to it. You guys tried to help get it passed, including the wiretap changes and the rest. Though it floundered for years, after 9-11, Congress rushed through an amended version of that legislation with overwhelming bipartisan support. You can ask the attorney generalist because I got a call when he introduced a Patriot Act. He said, Joe, I'm introducing the act basically as you wrote it in 1994. This bill met with an overwhelming, overwhelming agreement in Congress. He had laid the groundwork for a sweeping surveillance law that allowed the federal government to carry out criminal prosecutions based on secret evidence and to detain even U.S. citizens indefinitely without due process. This new law that I signed today will allow surveillance of all communications used by terrorists, including emails, the internet, and cell phones. We'd have a special bill passed through here, Mr. President, to allow enough money to let the FBI agents buy weapons as powerful as the drug cartels had to get beat up. Continuing his decades-long effort to militarize domestic law enforcement in the fight against drugs and terror, Biden had added a provision to the Patriot Act, allowing state and local police to obtain federal funding for special equipment to combat terrorism. There is a strong likelihood that Iraqis will welcome us as liberators. Biden played a key role in helping the Bush administration build support for other elements of its disastrous post-911 agenda, including toppling Saddam Hussein. There is an emerging pattern that convenience may throw him into the arms of al-Qaeda, so it must be dealt with. He must be dealt with. If you turned on now and the television showed aircraft striking Baghdad, it would not be a preemptive attack. There's nothing preemptive about that. It's an enforcement. Biden teamed with John McCain to defeat an amendment that would have prevented Bush from going to war unless he got approval from the UN Security Council. The UN will conclude, if we don't act, America will, so we better. He is still harboring and he is still seeking the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction. That case, I believe, has been made. Today, Biden has attempted to recast his vote to authorize military force in Iraq, claiming that he trusted President Bush to use that power only to pressure Saddam into allowing weapons inspections. The rationale was that's the way to not go to war because I didn't believe he had those nuclear weapons. I didn't believe he had those weapons of mass destruction. Former Bush and Obama administration defense secretary Robert Gates wrote in 2014 that Biden, quote, has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades. I do not believe this is a rush to war. I believe it's a march to peace and security. I've learned one thing since I've decided to run for president and I assume one thing. Everything about me, everything about me is going to come out in the public record. And I've done some dumb things and I'll do dumb things again. Joe Biden is again opportunistically changing his political approach in response to a high-profile threat and is preparing to remake himself as an economic populist who will bring transformative change through federal legislation. This is when leaders have to lead and governments have to work. This is going to take bold creative federal action. This will go down as one of the most progressive administrations in American history. The younger generation now tells me how tough things are. Give me a break. No, no. I have no empathy for it. Give me a break because here's the deal, guys. We decided we were going to change the world and we did. We did. In 2020, voters may feel obligated to choose the lesser evil, but they should be under no illusions about what a Biden presidency would mean. Trump keeps saying that he's a wartime president. We'll start to act like one. An avatar of the political establishment for over four decades, Biden has repeatedly taken advantage of critical moments in history to help lead us to disastrous foreign wars, police militarization, warrantless surveillance, border walls, and mass incarceration. Use your full authority. This is a war. Act like a commander-in-chief. Use it all.