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Biden’s Lame Duck Death Penalty One-upmanship
Lame duck: an elected official continuing to hold political office during the period between the election and the inauguration of a successor
One-upmanship: a situation in which someone does something in order to prove they are better than someone else
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In the early 1990s, Democratic Senator Joe Biden called Republican President George H. W. Bush “soft on crime” because the death penalty was rarely carried out at the federal level during Bush’s administration.
Biden joked that the crime bill he envisioned did “everything but hang people for jaywalking.”
The 1994 crime bill, drafted by Biden and signed by Democratic President Clinton, expanded the federal death penalty to make 60 crimes eligible for capital punishment, including espionage, treason, and large-scale drug trafficking. Most capital punishment supporters believe that the death penalty should only be used for first-degree murder, making Biden’s death penalty proposal for offenses other than premeditated murder excessive even for staunch proponents of capital punishment.
In the mid-1990s, 80 percent of Americans supported capital punishment for murderers, but when Biden campaigned for president in 2020, only 55 percent of Americans supported the death penalty — a historic low. Because Biden is a politician whose convictions coincide with public…