The Supreme Court Molded Joe Biden
Joe Biden became president in no small part because he’d been vice president. Had he become neither, he would have been remembered for something else entirely: the fate of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, two of the most divisive Supreme Court nominees in living memory. Now Biden has a chance to leave his most distinct imprint on a Court that shaped his legacy every bit as much as he influenced its makeup. His first pick could happen at any time: The oldest justice, Stephen Breyer, is 82 and under pressure to resign should the Democrats’ slender Senate majority vanish in the 2022 midterm elections.
Few presidents have been as bound up with the Supreme Court as Biden. A lawyer by training, he took over the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1987 under an agreement struck with Democratic Senator Edward M. Kennedy that would prove to be a risky trade-off. Biden had announced that he was running for president three weeks before President Ronald Reagan nominated Bork. Under the best of circumstances, the committee’s workload would eat into the time he needed to compete in a large Democratic field. But the position would also give Biden a national profile, for better and worse.
In October of that year, Bork was defeated by the most lopsided vote of any Supreme Court nominee in American history. Biden was in the same spot four years later when Thomas was confirmed by the slimmest margin in more than a century, following Anita Hill’s allegations that he had sexually harassed her. Each set of hearings became a nationally televised drama that earned Biden enemies and admirers who’ve never forgotten his outsize role. In the Bork case, he demonstrated pliable convictions and wobbly political instincts before settling on an approach that effectively sank the nomination. In his treatment of Hill, Biden revealed an obtuseness that he would spend the next three decades trying to live down.
