Aw: Matt Lauer 'just burst out crying' when Obama gave Biden the Medal of Freedom

But in fact, Biden’s career serves as a neat summary for much of the ruthlessness that Americans hate about our government, and he has managed to use his gaffe-prone nature to disguise his record of intense, bitterly partisan politicking. This trick was perhaps never more evident than in his egregious treatment of Reagan Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork — whom he successfully prevented from reaching the Court — and his similar but failed effort to prevent Clarence Thomas’s confirmation. Biden treated these two men disgracefully and in doing so played a crucial role in distorting our judicial-confirmation process so severely that it will likely never recover. Serving as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986, Biden initially promised to vote for Bork’s confirmation but quickly fell in line with Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy, who lied about Bork’s character and described “Bork’s America” as “a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions.” Moreover, Biden leveled a number of deeply unfair accusations at Bork. Among them: “It appears to me that you are saying that the government has as much right to control a married couple’s decision about choosing to have a child or not as that government has a right to control the public utility’s right to pollute the air.” The successful effort to torpedo Bork not only improperly politicized the confirmation process, it also led to the appointment of Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court, a decision that changed decades of American jurisprudence. For one thing, had Bork made it onto the Court instead of Kennedy, 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey likely would have overturned at least parts of the endlessly flawed Roe v. Wade decision, and several other key court cases would have been decided by a conservative majority. Biden also used his position as chairman of the Judiciary Committee to delay appeals-court nominees for months on partisan grounds, and he spearheaded the successful effort in 1986 to cast Jeff Sessions as unfit for a judgeship because of his supposed racial animus, going so far as to pressure a key witness into testifying against Sessions despite their friendship.

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