Joe Biden in Wikipedia.org political website
On Civil Rights:
1987 Biden Report: Reject Bork; he'd roll back civil rights
A brief [on Bork's Supreme Court nomination] was prepared for Joe Biden, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the Biden Report. Bork later said in his best-selling book The Tempting of America that the report "so thoroughly misrepresented a
plain record that it easily qualifies as world class in the category of scurrility."A hotly contested United States Senate debate over Bork's nomination ensued, partly fueled by strong opposition by civil and women's rights groups concerned with what
they claimed was Bork's desire to roll back civil rights decisions of the Warren and Burger courts. Bork is one of only three Supreme Court nominees to ever be opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union, along with William Rehnquist and Samuel Alito.
Bork was also criticized for being an "advocate of disproportionate powers for the executive branch of Government, almost executive supremacy," as allegedly demonstrated by his role in the Saturday Night Massacre.
Source: Wikipedia.org, "Robert Bork", re: Slouching Towards Gomorrah
Nov 17, 2009
On Government Reform:
1987: Rejected Bork on grounds of too-strong originalism
Biden chaired the Judiciary Committee during the contentious US Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork in 1987. Biden stated his opposition to Bork soon after the nomination, reversing an approval in an interview of a hypothetical Bork nomination he had
made the previous year and angering conservatives who thought he could not conduct the hearings dispassionately. At the close, Biden won praise for conducting the proceedings fairly and with good humor and courage, as his 1988 presidential campaign
collapsed in the middle of the hearings. Rejecting some of the less intellectually honest arguments that other Bork opponents were making, Biden framed his discussion around the belief that the US Constitution provides rights to liberty and privacy that
extend beyond those explicitly enumerated in the text, and that Bork's strong originalism was ideologically incompatible with that view. Bork's nomination was rejected in the committee by a 9- vote, and then rejected in the full Senate by a 58-2 margin.
Source: Wikipedia.org, "Joe Biden", re: Slouching Towards Gomorrah
Nov 17, 2009
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