Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is getting blowback for her recent remarks at a left-wing Netroots Nation event where she said the United States criminal justice system is racist.
“Let’s just start with the hard truth about our criminal justice system,” Warren said at an event on Friday hosted by Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Cedric Richmond at Dillard University in New Orleans. “It’s racist. It is.”
“And when I say our system, I mean all the way,” Warren said. “I mean front to back.”
“We’re talking about the front end on what you declare to be illegal; on how you enforce it, on who gets arrested,” Warren said.
On Sunday the Boston Herald published an editorial titled “Liz Warren keeps playing the blame game.”
The Herald wrote:
This comes on the heels of Sen. Warren’s call to abolish ICE a little more than a month ago. Then, like Friday, her rhetoric would reach the media’s standards of a “dark” speech if they used that barometer on anyone else but President Trump.
“President Trump seems to think that the only way to have immigration rule is to rip parents from their family, is to treat rape victims and refugees like terrorists and to put children in cages,” she said on City Hall Plaza in June. “This is ugly and this is wrong and this is not the way to run our country.”
“Now she is all in on the criminal justice system of the dastardly United States,” the Herald wrote.
“They shackle pregnant women. What kind of a country does this to people?” Warren said on Friday. “Our prison system is something that America should be ashamed of. What we do to other human beings is fundamentally wrong.”
The Herald pointed out that Warren has also trashed the president’s latest Supreme Court justice nominee, Brett Kavanuagh, calling his list of potential jurors a compilation made by “right-wing extremist groups” — the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation.
According to Warren, the Herald wrote, the country is in dire straits.
“Democracy has its back against the wall,” Warren said. “The dark money. The rich and the powerful. The folks who think they can hold our country by the throat.”
“The folks who think that we are here just to continue to produce more and more profits for them,” Warren said.
The Herald continued:
Is there any hard-working American who Elizabeth Warren has not condemned? Starting with business owners, “You didn’t build that,” to everyone involved in the criminal justice system at every level, “racist,” she almost always defaults to excoriating group A for the failures of group B rather than coming up with practical solutions.
The “great American family,” the Herald concluded, is under attack by Warren and the Democrats.
And on Monday, Republican candidate Beth Lindstrom, who hopes to take Warren’s Senate seat, called on her to apologize.
“Sen. Warren needs to apologize to every police officer, judge, corrections department employee, probation worker and the many other honest and decent people in our criminal justice system who have been smeared by her alienating and careless rhetoric,” Lindstrom said in a statement, the Washington Times reported.
“Words like this are polarizing and divisive: completely used for personal political gain for 2020, without regard for how they sound to the many good people in Massachusetts and around the country who are punishing criminals, keeping us safe and administering justice,” Lindstrom said.
“Others pointed out that until recently, the Justice Department was headed by Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who succeeded Eric Holder during the Obama administration,” the Times reported. “Both are black.”
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