Joe Biden Beatrice Gormley (classic children's novels txt) 📖

great team behind him, and he had incredible reserves of energy. He’d always been confident that he could do anything, if he only kept working hard enough. However, running for president is a full-time job, and Biden couldn’t ignore his duties as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Shortly after his dramatic announcement, an opening came up on the Supreme Court. President Reagan’s choice for the new justice was the ultraconservative Republican Robert Bork.

The Supreme Court

The nine justices of the Supreme Court, plus the lower federal courts, make up the third branch of the US government, the judicial branch. These judges are appointed by the president (the executive branch) but must be confirmed by the Senate (the legislative branch, together with the House of Representatives). The Supreme Court has the power to review a law of the land, and to rule it either constitutional or unconstitutional—that is, to affirm a law, or to strike it down.

Since the founding of the United States, the Supreme Court has made some momentous decisions for the country. The Dred Scott v. Sandford decision in 1857 ruled that a slave could not become free even by escaping to one of the states where slavery had been abolished, and that even free African Americans were not entitled to the rights and privileges of citizens. The Gideon v. Wainwright decision in 1963 ruled that a person accused of a crime, if not able to pay for a lawyer to defend them, must be provided with one. In the United States v. Nixon case in 1974, the court ruled that the president is not above the law, and so President Nixon had to turn over recordings made in the Oval Office.

Supreme Court justices are appointed for life, so their influence can last much longer than that of the president or other elected officials. And a justice doesn’t necessarily make decisions the way the president would like. The Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, who appointed Earl Warren as chief justice in 1953, later said that was one of his major mistakes. Eisenhower expected Warren to uphold conservative policies, but instead Warren led the court in making forceful decisions to outlaw racial segregation.

Up until now, the court had been fairly evenly balanced between liberal and conservative. But Judge Bork, if confirmed by the Senate, would push the Supreme Court over the line from moderate to conservative and back up the tendency of the Reagan administration to restrict civil rights and civil liberties. Bork had opposed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. He had stated openly that he wanted to roll back Supreme Court decisions such as Griswold v. Connecticut, which gave married couples the right to buy and use contraceptives.

Joe Biden had no doubt that Judge Bork would change the Supreme Court for the worse. But as chair of the Judiciary Committee, he was determined to give Bork a fair investigation. There was already an uproar of unfavorable publicity about Robert Bork’s nomination. He was opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that defends citizens’ rights. He was also attacked for carrying out President Nixon’s orders in 1973 during the Watergate scandal, which eventually led to Nixon’s resignation from the presidency.

A fair investigation of Bork would take time and hard work, cutting into Biden’s plans for his presidential campaign. And all the while his headaches were still plaguing him, in spite of the extra-strength Tylenol pills he kept taking. As Biden tried to protect civil rights and at the same time give Judge Bork a fair hearing, many accused him of being a weak leader. One columnist, George Will, called Biden “the incredible shrinking candidate.”

In August 1987, as Biden worked to get the Senate Judiciary Committee ready to hold hearings on Robert Bork, the campaign for president was heating up. Biden needed to pay more attention to Iowa, the first state to vote in the primary season. Jill had already traveled there several times to campaign for her husband.

Now Biden needed to appear in Iowa himself. On August 23 there would be a debate among the Democratic candidates, the most important campaign event of the entire summer. Busy with preparing for the Bork hearings, Biden didn’t take time to work on his debate speech. He trusted his ability to speak impromptu, and his gift for creating a bond with his audience.

During the plane trip to Iowa, Biden did ask one of his speechwriters how he should close the speech, since the closing makes the biggest impression. He decided to quote the words of a British politician, Neil Kinnock. Kinnock, campaigning for prime minister, had spoken eloquently about growing up in coal mining country, and being the first of his family to go to university.

Biden identified with Kinnock’s passion for his background. Biden, like Kinnock, had grown up in coal mining country. He also came from people who were intelligent but never had a chance to go to college. As Kinnock put it, “There was no platform upon which they could stand.”

These words, Joe Biden felt, expressed what the Democratic Party needed to do in the United States. The Republicans had knocked down the platform of government support built by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson for the working class. Democrats needed to be the party that rebuilt the platform better than ever. Biden had used this idea in speeches before, and it came naturally to him.

When it was Biden’s turn to give his closing speech at the debate, he spoke Kinnock’s words so movingly that some people in the audience wiped away tears. Afterward, one of his staff remarked that this time Biden had forgotten to give Kinnock credit, although he always had before. But it didn’t seem like a big worry at the time.

Then, on Saturday, September 12, a story broke in both the New York Times and the Des Moines Register. The Times story, on the front page, said that Biden had “lifted Mr. Kinnock’s closing speech.” And quickly NBC News ran a split-screen video