As we told you last night, Joe Biden is trying to tell us that we’re taking out of context the video of him saying on the floor of the Senate in 1992 that President George H.W. Bush “should not name a nominee until after the November election is completed.”
Sorry, but that doesn’t fly. Especially since Biden told the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne Jr. the exact same thing in 1992:
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has urged President Bush not to fill any vacancy that might open up on the Supreme Court until after the November election.
Warning that any election-year nominee “would become a victim” of a “power struggle” over control of the Supreme Court, Biden said he would also urge the Senate not to hold hearings on a nomination if Bush decided to name someone.
And:
Biden said he had no knowledge of whether any member of the high court planned to resign this year and added that he hoped no one would. But if a vacancy occurred — three of the justices are over 70 years old — he warned that any nominee would face a harrowing experience.
“If someone steps down, I would highly recommend the president not name someone, not send a name up,” Biden said. “If he {Bush} did send someone up, I would ask the Senate to seriously consider not having a hearing on that nominee.”
“Can you imagine dropping a nominee, after the three or four or five decisions that are about to made by the Supreme Court, into that fight, into that cauldron in the middle of a presidential year?” Biden went on. “I believe there would be no bounds of propriety that would be honored by either side. . . . The environment within which such a hearing would be held would be so supercharged and so prone to be able to be distorted.”
Biden went on to say that his move to block a nominee would be in the best interests of the nominee:
“Whomever the nominee was, good, bad or indifferent,” he added, “would become a victim.”
Also of note, Biden did call for more “consultation between the Senate and the president” and for a “compromise over the judicial and constitutional predispositions of a nominee.” Something President Obama didn’t do, mind you:
Biden also called for greater consultation between the Senate and the president before an individual is named to the court, including compromise over the judicial and constitutional predispositions of a nominee. “That is the root, that is the base, that is the essence of it,” Biden said. He added that if a nominee refused to answer questions about judicial philosophy, that alone should be grounds for a senator to oppose the nomination.
Can we finally dispel with this fiction that Joe Biden didn’t know what he was doing in 1992? Because he knew exactly what he was doing and now he’s mad that Senate Republicans are about to do the same thing.
Related:
‘Don’t believe our lying ears?’ Joe Biden: I didn’t REALLY mean what I said about SCOTUS noms
‘Oh my God. This is gold.’ 1992 Joe Biden torpedoes Dems’ SCOTUS beef
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