Right… some Republicans want to spin an alternative history and pretend that the Republican Party haven’t been the driving force behind the War on Drugs for decades.
See: How Richard Nixon started the War on Drugs in the first place.
The GOP ended up being so successful with their “tough-on-crime” and “law-and-order” rhetoric that mainline Democrats like Clinton and, yes, Biden felt they had no choice but to join them in a bipartisan fashion (see: ‘90’s crime bill).
But cracking down on drugs in a criminal sense is a fundamentally conservative movement, and the progressive caucus of the Democratic Party are the main ones today leading the way out. (Though it is true the Republican Party has a libertarian anti-drug-war wing.)
Matter of fact, this is JUST LIKE the Republicans today who ding Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden for their past support for the Iraq War even though George W. Bush and his neo-con gang are the ones who cooked it up. And the vast majority of Trump supporters (as bog standard Republicans) backed the Iraq War, too, at the time — minus the small wing of Ron Paul paleoconservatives. (I will credit Paul for speaking out against the Iraq War at GOP debates and drawing boos and howls, even though he didn’t win, and he’s a kook on most other things.)
I remember attending an Iraq War protest and almost getting my clock cleaned by a biker gang-looking, Vietnam War vet and self-styled “patriot” who was there to be a “counter-protestor” — I have zero doubt that he is today a MAGA dude and would swear to you that he never ever supported the Iraq War. (If he isn’t in jail or dead from a heart attack or OD, that is.)
Anyway. If we can take anything away from this, it’s that being “bipartisan” with Republicans in an effort to look “tough” on these kinds of issues is a mistake, and will only ever be used as a cudgel by Republicans against Democrats once the folly of said policies becomes clearer in time.
