Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Biden’s Greatest Hits, Installment One

Preview time! The following passages are drawn from Chapter 13 of the next volume of The Age of Reagan:

Indeed, the new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Joe Biden, never at a loss for words—even if they were someone else’s—had told a reporter in 1986: “Say the administration sends up Bork, and, after our investigation, he looks a lot like another Scalia. I’d have to vote for him, and if the groups tear me apart, that’s the medicine I’ll have to take. I’m not Ted Kennedy.”

Well, dropping that didn’t take long. I suspect he’s spending today dropping lots of his other sensible views to conform to Obamaworld.

Second excerpt:

Of all people, Sen. Biden was on to this weakness in Bork’s narrow originalism, and took after Bork from the right:

I believe all Americans are born with certain inalienable rights. As a child of God, I believe my rights are not derived from the Constitution. My rights are not derived from any government. My rights are not derived from any majority. My rights are because I exist. They were given to me and each of my fellow citizens by our creator and they represent the essence of human dignity.

The irony is that when Clarence Thomas came before the Judiciary Committee for his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991 espousing that very basis for his jurisprudence, it became the reason for which Biden opposed him.

Discussions - 2 Comments

Maybe he'll come to be endearing, like my dad's favorite politician, Everett Dirksen, who said, I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.

Irony is a polite way of putting it! I'm watching a repeat of the announcement in Springfield, IL, of Biden as Obama's VP--how embarrassing for Obama to have to tap the very guy who actually referred to him as, ahem, "clean." I suppose it is the mark of his ambition that he has long ago accepted these as petty but acceptable indecencies in comparison to the lofty goal of becoming POTUS. Hard not to notice Biden wearing a BLUE tie and Obama wearing a RED one. Wow, got the symbolism there; they are uniters of a divided America. Too bad Biden jumped off by sniping at McCain's "seven kitchens." The Democrats just can't help themselves in cultivating class envy. Woah, did Biden just call his running mate "Barack AMERICA"?! Yikes. More later.

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