Joe Biden is no bipartisan role model

The successful effort to torpedo Bork not only improperly politicized the confirmation process, it also led to the appointment of Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court, a decision that changed decades of American jurisprudence. For one thing, had Bork made it onto the Court instead of Kennedy, 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey likely would have overturned at least parts of the endlessly flawed Roe v. Wade decision, and several other key court cases would have been decided by a conservative majority. Biden also used his position as chairman of the Judiciary Committee to delay appeals-court nominees for months on partisan grounds, and he spearheaded the successful effort in 1986 to cast Jeff Sessions as unfit for a judgeship because of his supposed racial animus, going so far as to pressure a key witness into testifying against Sessions despite their friendship.

And though he was unable to block Thomas’s confirmation, despite utilizing similarly distasteful tactics, Biden managed to tarnish the man’s reputation so badly that the justice has never quite recovered in the eyes of many Americans. Biden’s example set a trend for progressives, making it acceptable to label black conservatives as inadequate representatives of their race because of their views. This attitude likely fueled the Smithsonian Museum of African American History’s exclusion of Thomas from its displays, and it motivates racist attacks against conservative leaders such as Ben Carson and South Carolina senator Tim Scott.

Aside from these nasty instances of partisan politics, Biden bears some responsibility for permitting his party to increasingly dogmatize the issue of abortion over time, as he lionized the decision in Roe and since that time has consistently supported most “abortion rights.” Though the logic of progressivism is arguably such that abortion would have found a foothold in the Democratic party no matter what, Biden and his contemporaries made it nearly impossible for truly pro-life politicians to remain within their party. If they had set a principled example, their party might not have so quickly established a woman’s right to an abortion as a central plank of its platform and as a litmus test for all who call themselves Democrats.