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How Joe Biden Wrecked the Judicial Confirmation Process
The Wall Street Journal ^ | COLLIN LEVY

Posted on 05/22/2009 7:30:39 AM PDT by GOP_Lady

The vice president can't complain if Republicans object to Obama's Supreme Court nominee.

Vice President Joe Biden is widely praised for the expertise he brings in helping Barack Obama choose a replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Having served for three decades on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he is considered an asset both for his relationships with committee members and his familiarity with the nuts and bolts of judicial nominations. So let's have a look at how the confirmation process actually fared under Mr. Biden's leadership.

As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Biden was present for the nomination and confirmation of every currently sitting Supreme Court justice except for John Paul Stevens. In 1986, the year before Mr. Biden took over as committee chairman, Antonin Scalia was approved by the Senate in a vote of 98-0. Then came Robert Bork and a presidential election.

(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...


TOPICS: Editorial; Government; News/Current Events; Political Humor/Cartoons; US: Delaware
KEYWORDS: 110th; biden; judiciary; robertscourt; scotus
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1 posted on 05/22/2009 7:30:39 AM PDT by GOP_Lady
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To: GOP_Lady

If anyone read that and understood it, I would love a summary. I found it to be written as if I already had an understanding of the history of who was nominated and when. I got totally lost as to why Biden is a threat now and am still not clear as to know if Bork was nominated or suggested.


2 posted on 05/22/2009 7:39:51 AM PDT by Calpernia (DefendOurFreedoms.Org)
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To: GOP_Lady
"Put out an A.P.B. on Joe Biden....."
3 posted on 05/22/2009 7:42:13 AM PDT by AngelesCrestHighway
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To: GOP_Lady
If the GOP ever hopes to win an election again, they had better "bork" anyone Zero sends up with a viciousness and severity that will bring tears to the eyes of Judge Bork. Otherwise, go away. Let's have a "Constitution Party" and let the GOP be put out of (our) misery. I swear if the Pubbies play footsie over this I doubt I will be alone in my sentiment.

Μολὼν λάβε


4 posted on 05/22/2009 7:45:57 AM PDT by wastoute (translation of tag "Come and get them (bastards)" and the Scout Motto)
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To: Calpernia

Bork would have been a good USSC Justice.


5 posted on 05/22/2009 7:48:21 AM PDT by OneWingedShark (Q: Why am I here? A: To do Justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with my God.)
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To: Calpernia

Yes, Bork was nominated. The hearings were just awful. They brutalized the man. He was completely blindsided.

Biden is the one who mostly put together the strategy to utterly demonize a nominee for deviating from some pretend “norm” of thought. It’s been downhill ever since.


6 posted on 05/22/2009 7:50:41 AM PDT by Bahbah
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To: GOP_Lady
They were led by Sen. Edward Kennedy, who demonized him with a monologue on "Robert Bork's America," which he promised would be "a land in which women would be forced into back alley abortions."

I guess if anyone knows about back alley abortions, it is Ted Kennedy.

7 posted on 05/22/2009 7:54:33 AM PDT by ReleaseTheHounds ("The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.")
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To: GOP_Lady

I don’t know if Biden the Slow actually wrecked the process, but he did make it rather tedious with his 75-minute questions.


8 posted on 05/22/2009 7:57:12 AM PDT by ScottinVA (Impeach President Soros!!!)
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To: ReleaseTheHounds

No he just drives them off a bridge.


9 posted on 05/22/2009 7:57:55 AM PDT by Bookie1066 (It's not going to be Atlas Shrugged but Atlas Shot Back.)
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To: ReleaseTheHounds

“I guess if anyone knows about back alley abortions, it is Ted Kennedy.”

Yeah, unfortunately, Killer Ted survived his.


10 posted on 05/22/2009 7:58:49 AM PDT by ScottinVA (Impeach President Soros!!!)
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To: GOP_Lady
As part of the Democrats assault on our Constitution and on the rule of law, Joe Biden contributed mightily after Ted Kennedy to converting the name "Bork" into a verb.


11 posted on 05/22/2009 8:02:21 AM PDT by nathanbedford ("Attack, repeat, attack!" Bull Halsey)
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To: Bahbah
I've heard from a number of sources that Bork's demise was partly due to strong behind-the-scenes opposition from Republican Party members who never forgave him for his role in the Watergate affair in 1973 as Solicitor General when he fired the independent prosecutor Archibald Cox. He ended up in this position as Solicitor General because Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy AG William Ruckelshaus had resigned rather than follow Nixon's orders in this matter.
12 posted on 05/22/2009 8:09:35 AM PDT by Alberta's Child (I'm out on the outskirts of nowhere . . . with ghosts on my trail, chasing me there.)
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To: GOP_Lady

“The Democrats treated the Bork confirmation hearing as a political process and the Republicans treated it as a confirmation hearing, which is why they lost.”
- Ambassador John Bolton


13 posted on 05/22/2009 8:13:28 AM PDT by frog in a pot (Socialism is inconsistent with the Constitution and is one of the "domestic enemies".)
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To: Alberta's Child

Very interesting. That may be.


14 posted on 05/22/2009 8:21:12 AM PDT by Bahbah
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To: Bahbah

I Hear [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

decent rumors that U.S. marshals have been assigned to Diane Wood.

You know this is bad when Ed Whelan writes, as he did in Part 1 of his series on her:

I’ll ... highlight Wood’s plain defiance of the Supreme Court’s initial order of reversal and her resort to a legal argument so flimsy that that the Court unanimously rejected it.

Supreme Court Candidate Diane Wood [Ed Whelan]

Kathryn: I’d be wary of reading too much into rumors that U.S. marshals have been assigned to Seventh Circuit judge, and Supreme Court candidate, Diane Wood. But since you’ve kindly highlighted my posts on Wood, let me offer this summary:

Wood is a hard-left judicial activist and aggressor on culture-war issues:

· Wood is clearly ready to invent a constitutional right to same-sex marriage: “The right not to have the State prescribe a set of acceptable spouses, in the absence of the kind of powerful reason it would have for incest laws or laws designed to protect children, is implicit in the concept of liberty.” (Wood, “Reflections on the Judicial Oath” (8 Green Bag 2d 177, 184 (2005).)

· Wood evidently believes that the inclusion of “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance violates the Establishment Clause and that a Supreme Court ruling permitting that phrase would “announce that the United States is a nation that has adopted monotheism as its official state dogma.” (See my Part 5 post, point 3 here.)

· Wood believes that it’s proper for the Supreme Court to revise the meaning of constitutional provisions to reflect contemporary international and foreign practices. (See my Part 5 post, point 2.) As Harold Koh’s transnationalism shows, that approach threatens cherished First Amendment rights of free speech and religion at the same time that it leads to the invention of new rights that entrench the agenda of international leftist elites.

· No judge whom I’m aware of is more extreme than Wood on abortion. Her defiance of the Supreme Court’s mandate in NOW v. Scheidler (and her incurring successive 8-1 and 8-0 reversals by the Court) ought alone to be disqualifying. In addition, Wood has (in dissent) voted to strike down state laws banning partial-birth abortion and (again in dissent) voted to strike down an Indiana informed-consent law that was in all material respects identical to the law upheld by the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Wood is aggressive in pursuing her ideological agenda. Her willful lawlessness on remand in NOW v. Scheidler is the starkest example. But consider also her behavior at oral argument in a case presenting the question whether a law school violated the rights of a Christian Legal Society chapter by revoking its official status as a student organization because of the chapter’s membership policies. Wood viciously maintained that the CLS chapter viewed homosexuals as “less than fully human,” conspicuously turned her back on CLS counsel as he explained CLS’s orthodox Christian beliefs, and turned back around to exclaim “Goodness!”

In his Notre Dame speech last week, President Obama encouraged “fair-minded words” and opposed “reducing those with differing views to caricature.” That’s hardly what Wood’s conduct in the CLS case demonstrates.

More broadly, President Obama says that he wants to find “common ground” on abortion and other culture-war issues, and he says that he opposes same-sex marriage. If so, he wouldn’t nominate Diane Wood to the Supreme Court.


15 posted on 05/22/2009 8:31:19 AM PDT by roses of sharon (NOTRE DAMIAN: ABORTION, YES WE CAN!)
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To: roses of sharon

Wow, she sounds like a doozie.

And far from judicial material. It is pretty horrifying that she is on ANY court.


16 posted on 05/22/2009 8:36:54 AM PDT by Bahbah
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To: Calpernia
If anyone read that and understood it, I would love a summary. I found it to be written as if I already had an understanding of the history of who was nominated and when. I got totally lost as to why Biden is a threat now and am still not clear as to know if Bork was nominated or suggested.

Before Bork, pretty much anyone who was nominated by a sitting president would be confirmed. The Advise and consent part in the Senate was merely to determine if the nominee would be fit to be a judge. Starting with Bork, the 'rats began to question where the judges stood on certain issues. If they didn't agree with the judge's stance, they'd vote 'no' against the nominee.

This is how we got stuck with Souter. Bush 41 nominated someone who would not reveal what his future opinions would be, so even the 'rats voted for him. Unfortunately, even Bush did not know where Souter would stand either, and he turned out to be a big leftist.

The 'rats hit a snag with Clarence Thomas. After lib Thurgood Marshall died, Bush picked a black man to succeed him, because everybody felt that Marshall's seat "must be reserved for a black man". So, Bush picks Clarence Thomas. Even though the libs did not want Thomas because they considered him conservative, they were too gutless to "Bork" him, for fear of having their own race card thrown at them. So, they concocted the ridiculous Anita Hill BS story to attempt to discredit Thomas. Fortunately, it did not work, and Thomas squeaked in.

Biden led the 'rats down the road to dishonor from Bork onwards.

17 posted on 05/22/2009 8:44:43 AM PDT by Sans-Culotte
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To: Calpernia

Bork’s denial had nothing to do with his qualifications, it had to do with his involvement in the Saturday Night Massacre. All that stuff about renting weird videos was bullsheet. That vote was about payback.


18 posted on 05/22/2009 8:56:04 AM PDT by irish guard
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To: Alberta's Child
Richardson and Ruckelshaus had stipulated that they would not interfere with Cox as a condition of being confirmed in their appointments. Bork didn't have that condition, so when the two men above him resigned rather than follow the presidential order, that order landed on his desk in due course, and he put it into effect.

Funny how the libs never forget an offense, and pursue the offender all the way to the grave and beyond. Nixon implemented many of their pet plans, but none of that could make up for Alger Hiss in their eyes.

Meanwhile, so-called conservatives seem not to notice liberal offenses even as they happen, much less remember them for 10 minutes.

19 posted on 05/22/2009 1:54:09 PM PDT by thulldud (It HAS happened here!)
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To: Sans-Culotte; irish guard; Bahbah; Alberta's Child

Thanks!


20 posted on 05/24/2009 4:17:13 AM PDT by Calpernia (DefendOurFreedoms.Org)
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