Cory Booker Chats With Wendy Williams: Guns, Pot, Rosario Dawson

ESSEX COUNTY, NJ — Want to see Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey smile? Ask him what it’s like to date Rosario Dawson.

Booker, who lives in Newark where he once served as mayor, has become well-known for his emotional facial expressions – especially those that invoke his ire – a characteristic so pronounced it’s been parodied on Saturday Night Live.

But when fellow Essex County resident Wendy Williams took a break from more serious issues such as gun violence to ask how things were going with the actress during her recent interview with Booker, things got visibly lighter.

“I have a lot of confidence in a lot of areas,” Booker recalled with a grin, speaking about his second meeting with Dawson, which took place at a party hosted by Sarah Silverman. “But I didn’t have a lot of confidence when I asked for her phone number.”

Booker’s conversation with Williams, a Livingston resident, wasn’t all grins, however. The senator reverted to his grimacing, brow-furrowing persona when speaking about two of his presidential campaign pillars: stopping gun violence and legalizing marijuana.

“We have a crisis,” Booker said of gun violence. “No other country has carnage like this in their streets. So how do I feel, as a guy who has been to too many children's funerals, who sees shrines of kids in the streets, who literally sat with and tried to stop a boy from bleeding to death who was shot across the street from where my mentees live?”

“This is personal to me,” said Booker, who has proposed that the U.S. create a national gun licensing program and a sweeping block of policy changes aimed at “keeping guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them and holding the gun industry accountable.”

• See related article: Sen. Cory Booker Releases 'Sweeping Plan' To Combat Gun Violence
• See related article: NRA Calls Sen. Booker's Gun Violence Plan 'Senseless, Slapdash'

Booker also lambasted the War on Drugs and advocated for marijuana legalization during his appearance on Williams’ show.

“There's no difference in America between blacks and whites for smoking marijuana or even selling marijuana, but blacks are about four times more likely to be convicted of it,” said Booker, who has introduced a plan to end the federal prohibition on cannabis.

The bill – dubbed the Marijuana Justice Act – is retroactive and would apply to those already serving time behind bars for marijuana-related offenses, a necessary part of any legalization efforts, Booker has said.

• See related article: Marijuana Justice Act Would Make Weed Legal In US
• See related article: NJ Marijuana Arrests 'Soaring' As Legalization Debate Continues

“The War on Drugs has not been a war on drugs,” Booker insisted. “It's been a war on our people, people of color in particular.”

It’s not just minorities who are getting disproportionately busted for weed, Booker added. Military veterans and poor people are also facing unfair heat, too.

“I put in the first major bill to legalize marijuana, but I'm also one of these with a very strong, strong conviction on this issue that you should never talk about legalization of marijuana if you're not talking, in the same paragraph, about expunging the records of those people who have been convicted in the past,” Booker said.

Watch the full video below.

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