When it comes to politicizing the Supreme Court, Biden went there first
National Post, 25 September 2020
Don’t go there? America already has, a long time ago. And Biden was one of the principal figures getting her there.
“Don’t go there,” Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden told U.S. President Donald Trump and the Republicans after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, warning them of the political and social consequences of pushing through a replacement in the weeks before the election. He pleaded instead to lower the temperature, to avoiding a combustible appointment to the high court and to leave it to him to appoint a new justice after he is (or so he hopes) elected president.
Don’t go there? America already has, a long time ago. And Biden was one of the principal figures getting her there.
Some 33 years ago — a nice biblical number — then-senator Joe Biden began running for president. It is astonishing: Biden, who will turn 78 years old a fortnight after election day, has spent more than half his adult life running for president — three attempts stretching out over three decades.
The first attempt was launched in the summer of 1987, during America’s bicentennial celebrations. That summer, President Ronald Reagan nominated an eminent jurist and a true scholar of the constitution to the Supreme Court, Robert Bork.
Sen. Ted Kennedy took to the Senate floor less than an hour after Reagan’s nomination and urged his fellow senators, in effect, let’s go there. It was one of the most extreme speeches in the long, lamentable history of demagoguery.
“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government,” thundered Kennedy.
The poison that defamatory explosion injected into Supreme Court nominations is still coursing through the American body politic.
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