Biden's White House is pushing to undo the crack cocaine sentencing disparity. But will enough Republicans support it?
![President Joe Biden promised during his campaign to reduce the prison population.](https://cdn.statically.io/img/www.usatoday.com/gcdn/presto/2021/07/08/USAT/01582d65-ce49-442c-b725-68a74cacaaa7-AP_Biden_14.jpg?width=980&height=654&fit=crop&format=pjpg&auto=webp)
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Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version of this story misstated the Republican support for the proposal in the Senate. Two Republicans, Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio. have co-sponsored the bill.
WASHINGTON – The year was 1986, and fears over crack cocaine were at a fever pitch.
New York City, as one headline put it, was "swamped by 'crack.'" Faced with a media frenzy and a high-stakes election year, Congress hastily passed a law that punished crack cocaine offenses far more severely than powder cocaine offenses – a policy that sent a disproportionate number of low-level drug offenders, most of whom were Black, to prison.
Thirty-five years later, lawmakers are trying to undo the consequences of what they now believe is a misguided law, a brutal consequence of the war on drugs. President Joe Biden, who helped craft the 1986 bill when he was a senator and has since tried to undo its impact, has placed his White House behind new legislation that would close the disparity by allowing crack cocaine offenders to ask for a reduced sentence.