Former Vice President Joe Biden released a new criminal justice plan on Tuesday, and it didn't take long for the 2020 subtweets to follow.
Biden has faced criticism over his role in writing the 1994 crime bill, including from fellow 2020 Democrat Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who has called the law "shameful" while Biden has argued it did not lead to mass incarceration. On Tuesday, Biden released a new criminal justice plan, with his campaign saying that "we can and must reduce the number of people incarcerated in this country while also reducing crime." The plan's proposals include eliminating mandatory minimums, ending cash bail, and ending the disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentencing, CNN reports.
But Booker, clearly, isn't satisfied, sending out a tweet that doesn't mention Biden's name directly but obviously calls him out by saying that "it's not enough to tell us what you're going to do," telling Biden to "show us what you've done for the last 40 years," a number that just happens to line up with the approximate length of Biden's political career; he began serving in the Senate in 1973. Booker also hits Biden by writing that he "created" the system that he plans to "dismantle."
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Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) surged in the polls after going after Biden during the first Democratic debate, and this tweet would appear to suggest Booker has a similar strategy in mind for the second round of debates next week. Though Booker didn't share the debate stage with Biden last month, he will this time — and as Bloomberg's Jennifer Epstein points out, it just so happens that two of Biden's fiercest critics in the field, Booker and Harris, will be on either side of him.
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