Bill Clinton threw Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., under the bus Tuesday after a
Black Lives Matter activist heckled the former president over rising incarceration rates.
The moment occurred at a campaign rally for Hillary Clinton in Athens, Ohio.
“I will not vote for a candidate who has sent million of my people to prison!” the heckler, who was reportedly wearing a “Black Lives Matter” shirt, shouted during Bill Clinton’s address.
The former president responded, “I agree. If I had sent millions of your people to prison, or she had, that wouldn’t be good.”
He added, “Hillary didn’t vote for the ’94 crime bill, even though Sen. Sanders did. And neither one of them were trying to send millions of your people to prison because there were fewer than 10 percent of our entire prison population are in the federal prison system.”
Bill Clinton has stated publicly that he regrets signing the 1994 crime bill, and said recently that it led to several “regrettable” consequences, namely, an increase in mass incarcerations.
“I signed a bill that made the problem worse,” Clinton said in 2015 before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s annual meeting in Philadelphia. “And I want to admit it.”
The legislation that Clinton signed in 1994 included a so-called “three strikes” provision, which ruled that anyone convicted of a violent felony after two or more prior convictions would get a life sentence.
Clinton said he signed the bill because “we had had a roaring decade of rising crime” when he took office.
“We had gang warfare on the streets. We had little children being shot dead on the streets who were just innocent bystanders standing in the wrong place,” he said.
On Tuesday, the former president praised the Democratic nominee for making criminal justice reform a focus of her campaign.
“And she was the first person in this campaign who said we ought to do something to change the incarceration policies and to reduce prison terms. No one else has done that,” Bill Clinton said at the rally in Athens.
His response to the heckler comes as Sanders, who ran a competitive and combative campaign during the Democratic primary, is on the road now serving as one of Hillary Clinton’s top surrogates.
Bill Clinton’s comments also come after audio leaked this weekend revealed Hillary Clinton said in February that young voters who supported the Vermont senator were likely economically depressed political neophytes.
“Some are new to politics completely. They’re children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents’ basement. They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don’t see much of a future,” Hillary Clinton said at a private fundraiser in McLean, Va.
Clinton added, “[S]o if you’re feeling like you’re consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some other job that doesn’t pay a lot, and doesn’t have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing.”
The Democratic nominee’s running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., vowed in an interview in September that their campaign wouldn’t repeat the mistake of signing legislation like the 1994 crime bill.
“I think we have learned from painful experience that, as a nation, we are so far out of whack with the rest of the [world] in the way we use incarceration,” Kaine told “CBS This Morning.”
“Hillary and I both strongly support criminal justice reform which isn’t just about sentencing,” he added, “look, the crime bill in ’94 it had consequences that went farther than we wanted. We’ve got to roll that back, and I think there is some bipartisan interest in doing this now.”
