It’s not Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party anymore.
That was the message Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, attempted to send with his “vote-a-rama” amendment to the budget resolution funding 100,000 new police officers across the country.
A hundred thousand new police officers on the street was a key Clinton campaign promise in 1992, then later the centerpiece of the 1994 bill he signed into law. President Joe Biden, then a senator from Delaware and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, helped get the legislation written and passed.
Neither the White House nor Senate Democrats took the bait. “The Republicans are joining the Democrats in supporting Joe Biden’s cops program,” said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the chamber. “A long overdue but appreciated shift,” White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates tweeted approvingly.
SHADES OF PAST CONSERVATIVE REVOLTS APPEAR IN GOP INFRASTRUCTURE SPLIT
The amendment to the nonbinding budget resolution passed 95-3, with two of the no votes coming from Republicans. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was the only lawmaker who caucused with the Democrats to oppose it. Undeterred, Hawley challenged them to support his stand-alone legislation on the issue.
“As you have recognized, putting 100,000 more officers on the beat is vitally important for public safety. Defunding the police is exactly wrong; we must increase funding for new cops,” he wrote in a letter to Senate Democrats. “On the Senate floor, Senator Durbin eloquently reminded us of President Biden’s support for a similar idea in the 1994 crime bill that he authored as a Senator. … I am thrilled there is near-unanimous support for increased funding for police and for putting more cops on the beat.”
While the gambit makes inherent political sense as law-and-order Republicans seek to capitalize on rising crime under the Democrats’ watch, populists like Hawley have often railed against the Clinton years. Former President Donald Trump campaigned twice against the 1994 crime bill, Clinton-approved trade deals, and foreign wars that relatively centrist Democrats, including Biden and Hillary Clinton, heavily supported.
Hawley has made these arguments himself. “My concerns, as I’ve said before, about what I’m seeing from Vice President Biden is [that] the people who he wants to be in his Cabinet are all a bunch of corporate liberals and warmongers,” he told reporters last year. “So I’d like to see him break the mold.”
But as Afghanistan spirals out of control amid a Biden-ordered U.S. withdrawal and homicides spike in major cities mostly governed by Democrats, Republicans see an opening to public safety and national security liabilities for the Democrats to a degree they haven’t been since before Clinton.
Democrats were perceived as weak on crime and defense. After this doomed them in the 1988 presidential election, “New Democrats” such as Bill Clinton, with the assistance of party establishment types such as Biden, sought to address these political liabilities.
Biden, who beat Sanders in the primaries and prided himself on largely ignoring the online Left during last year’s general election campaign, has tried to avoid going back to the days of Michael Dukakis. “They aren’t saying ‘Joe Biden is anti-police,’ cops are not saying that about Joe Biden. They know me, period,” the president insisted in a CNN town hall last month. “They’re not saying it.”
Still, Biden’s efforts to distance his party from the defund the police movement haven’t prevented younger liberals from influencing the Democratic brand on the issue. Top Democratic operatives have concluded that the association hurt them in 2020, even as they won the White House and Congress, albeit by smaller margins than expected, including with nonwhite voters.
Crime and foreign policy aren’t the only areas where the GOP perceives an opportunity to restore the Democrats’ pre-Clinton image. “Joe Biden is bringing America back to the 1970s with gas lines, unemployment, and price increases,” Republican National Committee spokesman Tommy Pigott said earlier this year. “His misguided big-spending policy proposals will likely hit Americans hard ‘in their pocketbooks.’ Instead of building on the recovery he inherited, Biden is squandering it, and Americans are paying the price.”
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The Clintons’ legacy has also been under assault on the Left, as much of Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination attacked their “triangulation” approach to politics even more than Trump did. Hillary Clinton’s political career seemingly ended with her loss to Trump. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s resignation suggested Democrats may be less tolerant of sexual misconduct within their ranks than during the 1990s Monica Lewinsky scandal.
But it is Republicans who have the most at stake in ensuring the political weaknesses the Clintons were thought to have addressed become a major headache for Democrats again.
