New Jersey Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker swatted away Bernie Sanders‘ plan to allow all convicted criminals to vote while in prison, and singled out racist mass murderer Dylann Roof as someone who would benefit from Sanders’ policy.

During an interview with PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff, Booker was asked about Sanders’ recent comments at a CNN town hall, in which he called for prisoners — including the Boston Marathon bomber — to be allowed to vote while they’re in prison. Sanders has since taken that cause onto the stump.

“As I’m sure you know, Senator Sanders has said they should not only have the right to vote when they’re released from prison, they should have that right while they’re incarcerated,” Woodruff said, and asked “Do you agree with him?”

A clearly displeased Booker replied “I just think that that is a frustrating debate that we seem to now be having.”

“As a guy who lives in an inner-city black community, and knows that there are millions of Americans that are being arrested and convicted and should never be there in the first — they not only lose their right to vote, but they lose their liberty,” Booker continued, and cited mass incarceration and marijuana arrests, noting “we have a nation that takes away people’s liberty and their right to vote for doing things that two of the last three presidents admitted to doing.”

“So if Bernie Sanders wants to get involved in a conversation about whether Dylann Roof and the Marathon bomber should have the right to vote,” Booker said, “my focus is liberating black and brown people and low-income people from prison, because we have a system in America, as Bryan Stevenson says, that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.”

Sanders’ proposal, first expressed at a Fox News town hall event, quickly became a standard question for all Democratic candidates. Booker’s use of Dylann Roof as an example is a particularly strong escalation of the premise, against a candidate who has struggled — quite recently — to connect with black voters.

Watch the clip above, via PBS.

from Mediaite http://bit.ly/2DIbBOT