The Ginni Thomas plot to overthrow the United States government is so much deeper than most people realize. Texas Paul reacts to the latest bombshell developments surrounding Ginni and Justice Thomas and lays out the case as to why Clarence Thomas must be impeached to save our Republic.
hey folks this is old texas paul i want
you to take a look at this video of
clarence thomas
and uh i’ll i’ll be right back one of
the things i say
in response to the media is when they
talk about especially early on about the
way i did my job i said i will
absolutely
leave the court when i do my job as
poorly as you do yours
and that was meant as a compliment
really
you hear that smoke some
do you hear that
can you listen to that and not tell me
that you believe that every word anita
hill said
was
absolute gospel
absolute gospel
you know i i want to read you another
quote
from and i wrote it down so that
made sure i got a word for word okay i
want to read you another quote from
clarence thomas
as a society we are becoming addicted to wantingwantsays the man that is overturning 50 years of legal
precedent by voting to drag down roe v wadeyeah i want to
just add a disclosure here okay this
isn’t just politics this this is
personal
i don’t just politically disagree with
clarence and jenny thomas
i
personally dislike them
they are a cancer on our country
and it is time to do something about it
it is time to do something about it you
know you go back to
take a look at clarence thomas
and he has been the worst
supreme court justice that i i i can you
know i’m a history buff and i i it’s
hard
to come up with one that has been worse
than clarence thomas he spent 10 years
10
years as a supreme court justice
and never asked a question
you know every once in a while
during the oral arguments a justice will
sit and listen
you know
maybe the questions that they had on or
whatever will be asked by another
justice whatever it’s not unheard of for
for a justice to sit quietly through
oral arguments occasionally but 10 years
10 years without a question that is a
record people
no one has ever even come close to that
just did not contribute to oral
arguments at all
and it’s not just lazy stupidity i mean
it’s it’s
he is a horrible
person
you look at the decisions
that that he’s he’s made you know like
flowers versus mississippi this was a
case that was clear clear-cut
this is a case that brett kavanaugh in
the majority opinion
said
the prosecutors were cartoonishly racist
brett kavanaugh called them cartoonishly
racist yeah clarence thomas said no that
was fine what they did was fine
yeah no no big deal
i mean he is
by far the worst
supreme court justice we have ever had
and his wife
has been flirting with the line between
activism and and just straight up
bribery
for a long time it goes back way back
when she worked with for the heritage
foundation if you remember if you’re old
like me you remember
the bush administration asked the
heritage foundation to give them a list
of
appointees the person at the heritage
foundation that was employed by the
heritage foundation and did that work
for bush
was jenny thomas while her husband
was listening to oral arguments
in bush v gore
i mean really that’s not a conflict i
mean you’ve got your wife working for
one of the people that is a complainant
it gets worse than that she started a
consulting company called liberty
consulting and she’s on
all of these radical right-wing
organizations boards
all i mean just
like turning point usa
if you don’t know who they are
they’re a group
that wants to recruit young people into
the conservative movement so they’ve set
up
you know organizations in on college
campuses all over the country
they just set one up in my grandson’s
college
um they’ve had a real problem they’ve
had a real problem they’ve had some
uh racism scandals
uh you know people that work there using
the n-word stuff like that but
by far the worst to come out was a woman
by the name of crystal clayton she just
flat out in one of her snapchats says i
hate black people
and bacon a day will keep the islam away
and she thought that was hilarious
that blew up and you know turning point
usa had had so many scandals
they ended up having to actually fire
her although actually they
guess they really didn’t because
uh jenny thomas was
on the advisory board for turning point
usa and crystal clayton went to working
from here
to working for jenny thomas
and she travels with her
she does some media work for her and
she’s
been to her home out in fairfax station
virginia and
taking pictures with her and you know
these are the kind of people that
that jenny thomas
works with and represents all the damn
time it’s really starting to get clouded
with her husband because
you know it’s like you’ve got this uh uh
center for security and policy there’s
another one uh the guy by then frank
gaffney runs that he’s paying jenny
thomas two hundred thousand dollars
for something
you know something we don’t know we
don’t know what kind of consulting she
does for him but at the same time frank
gaffney who has a real muslim problem
has been
identified by the anti-deaf defamation
league as putting forward conspiracy
theories about muslims and whatnot it
files an amicus brief
in trump’s muslim ban
yeah
the center for security policy files an
amicus brief on a case that’s before the
supreme court and has paid jenny thomas
two hundred thousand dollars and
clarence thomas uh
upheld the muslim play voted to uphold
the muslim ban it was uphill yeah
i mean
i i don’t know how more clear-cut that
that gets i mean you know i mean
you pumped two hundred 200 000 into the
thomas household
and you’re
filing amicus briefs on a case
that
thomas is hearing
yeah
and it gets worse people it gets worse
i mean
you think that’s bad i mean but it gets
they’re really a cancer on our society
it gets worse
we know that it had come out that jenny
thomas and all of her activism and
whatnot had been if you want to call it
that i call it insurrection had been
bombarding mark meadows with complaints
after the election she wanted sidney
powell
to represent
donald trump
she wanted to release the kraken and she
was putting forward all these q and on
conspiracy theories all over facebook
social media everywhere just bombing it
was just
nut balk and conspiracy theories and
blowing up mark meadows phone now i
i
don’t exactly know why the wife of a
supreme court justice would have the
president chief of staff’s phone number
but she did she’s just texting the
out of him trying to get him to
to overturn that election and not only
is jenny thomas telling mark meadows who
needs to lead trump’s legal defense
she’s telling him who to purge who to
fire in various departments and that she
wants to
to vet people and provide him with a
list of people she she is going to tell
the trump white house who to hire who’s
loyal to trump she wants to go through
and fire all the disloyal is that not
fascism i mean is that not pure fascism
she wants to go through and vet people
that she considers herself to be
disloyal to trump and provide them with
a list of people that she thinks will be
sufficiently loyal not loyal to the
constitution loyal to trump oh and
just an fyi one of the people on that
list serve
is john eastman
he’s a former clerk
of clarence thomas and if you
haven’t been following things john
eastman is trump’s lawyer
yeah he he just
was the one that lost his court case
uh to keep his coup memos he planned the
coup for donald
trump yeah
another
winner around
the uh
thomases
didn’t stop there she also got in touch
we find out with shauna bolek who is
at the time
right after the election working real
hard to get things overturned in arizona
she
being jenny thomas had contacted bolick
who is a good family friend her husband
clint bolick is on the arizona supreme
court and clarence thomas is their kid’s
godfather so jenny thomas is badgering
her to
set aside the
certification for the election just
undeclare biden the victor and create
their own slate of electors
i’m not even kidding
i’m not even kidding meanwhile clarence
thomas hears a case regarding
communications between the white house
and everybody trying to overthrow this
damn election and he doesn’t recuse
himself are you telling me that you
believe that clarence thomas didn’t know
his wife was contacting the bola
household i mean he’s he’s godfather to
their child you’re telling me he didn’t
know that he was contacting them asking
shauna bullock to to overturn this
election and shawna bullock didn’t shy
away either i mean she immediately told
jenny thomas how to protest you know
file protests and stuff in arizona and
the side note she’s running for
secretary of state now
yeah
good news there right because she
absolutely failed because she tried to
pass bill shauna bullock tried to pass a
bill in arizona that said the
legislature
could legally
just set aside
certifications
you know that was the problem they had
before is they couldn’t legally do it
they wanted to make it legal thank god
that got voted down but now she wants to
be secretary of state yeah folks these
people are a cancer they are a real
cancer
and we’ve got to root it out clarence
thomas needs to be impeached
he does
you know there there’s a
real problem
in our supreme court
it’s no longer
just calling balls and strikes
we’ve got people in that supreme court
that are
absolutely politically involved
they’re absolutely crossing the line
with where their money
and whatnot comes in blurring those
lines and jenny thomas is the worst of
it she had to apologize did you if you
don’t list service listserv is a lot of
people don’t listserv is just a service
where you
batch together a bunch of people on
emails and it and and you
create groups and you have discussions
back and forth
uh between people well all of clarence
thomas’s clerks are in a listserv group
together
jenny thomas just took over
clarence thomas’s
supreme court justice clarence thomas’s
list serve and tried to push this crazy
q anon
nut ball let’s overthrow the election
conspiracy
on the supreme supreme court justices
lister this is going out to judges these
former clerks are
all over the place she ended up having
to make a public apology for it but yeah
i mean think about that this is part of
his job now
she is getting involved in
all of his former clerks it’s insane
people it is just insane
this
is beyond the pale this has to stop
we have to impeach clarence thomas and
we have to impeach him now thanks folks
i
appreciate you texas paul out
Ginni and Clarence Thomas Have Done Enough Damage
What did Justice Clarence Thomas know, and when did he know it?
The question usually gets directed at politicians, not judges, but it’s a fair one in light of the revelation on Thursday that Justice Thomas’s wife, Ginni, was working feverishly behind the scenes — and to a far greater degree than she previously admitted — in a high-level effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
As The Washington Post and CBS News first reported, Ms. Thomas, a supremely well-connected right-wing agitator, was in constant communication with the White House in the weeks following the election, strategizing over how to keep Donald Trump in office despite his incontrovertible loss. “Do not concede,” she texted to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, on Nov. 6, the day before the major news networks called the election for Joe Biden. “It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.” (To date, Mr. Trump has not conceded.)
In dozens of messages with Mr. Meadows over several weeks, Ms. Thomas raged over baseless allegations of voter fraud and shared unhinged conspiracy theories, including one that the “Biden crime family” was in the process of being arrested and sent to Guantánamo Bay for “ballot fraud.”
“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” Ms. Thomas wrote at one point. “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
Ms. Thomas had already acknowledged some involvement in the fight over the 2020 election count, recently confirming that she attended the Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally in Washington, but she said she went home before Mr. Trump spoke to the crowd and before a mob of hundreds stormed the Capitol in a violent attempt to block the certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory. The texts reveal that her efforts to subvert the election were far more serious than we knew.
Now recall that in January, the Supreme Court rejected Mr. Trump’s request to block the release of White House records relating to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. Mr. Meadows had submitted a brief in the case supporting Mr. Trump. The court’s ruling came as an unsigned order, with only one noted dissent: from Justice Thomas.
Perhaps Justice Thomas was not aware of his wife’s text-message campaign to Mr. Meadows at the time. But it sure makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
And that’s precisely the problem: We shouldn’t have to wonder. The Supreme Court is the most powerful judicial body in the country, and yet, as Alexander Hamilton reminded us, it has neither the sword nor the purse as a means to enforce its rulings. It depends instead on the American people’s acceptance of its legitimacy, which is why the justices must make every possible effort to appear fair, unbiased and beyond reproach.
That may seem naïve, particularly in the face of the crippling assaults on the court that Mitch McConnell and his Senate Republicans have carried out over the past six years in order to secure a right-wing supermajority that often resembles a judicial policy arm of the Republican Party — starting with their theft of a vacancy that was President Barack Obama’s to fill and continuing through the last-second confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett while millions of voters were already in the process of casting Mr. Trump out of office.
And yet the public’s demand for basic fairness and judicial neutrality is not only proper but critical to the court’s integrity, as the justices, whoever nominated them, are well aware. Partly in response to the court’s tanking public-approval ratings, several of them have grown increasingly outspoken in defense of their independence. (Though not all of them.)
The most obvious way for justices to demonstrate that independence in practice, of course, is to recuse themselves from any case in which their impartiality might reasonably be questioned. It does not matter whether there is, in fact, a conflict of interest; the mere appearance of bias or conflict should be enough to compel Justice Thomas or any other member of the court to step aside.
Many of them have over the years, out of respect for the court as an institution and for the public’s faith in their probity. Just this week, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson vowed that if confirmed she would recuse herself from an upcoming case challenging Harvard’s affirmative-action policies, because of her multiple personal and professional connections to the university. Legal-ethics experts are not even in agreement that her recusal would be necessary, but Judge Jackson is right to err on the side of caution.
Justice Thomas has paid lip service to this ideal. “I think the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference,” he said in a speech last year. “That’s a problem. You’re going to jeopardize any faith in the legal institutions.”
Bench memo to the justice: You know what jeopardizes public faith in legal institutions? Refusing to recuse yourself from numerous high-profile cases in which your wife has been personally and sometimes financially entangled, as The New Yorker reported in January. Especially when you have emphasized that you and she are melded “into one being.” Or when you have, as The Times Magazine reported last month, appeared together with her for years “at highly political events hosted by advocates hoping to sway the court.”
Ms. Thomas’s efforts, and her husband’s refusal to respond appropriately, have been haunting the court for years, but this latest conflagration shouldn’t be a close call. “The texts are the narrowest way of looking at this,” Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor and one of the nation’s foremost legal-ethics experts, told me. “She signed up for Stop the Steal. She was part of the team, and that team had an interest in how the court would rule. That’s all I need to know.” He said he has over the years resisted calling for Justice Thomas’s recusal based on his wife’s actions, “but they’ve really abused that tolerance.”
Yes, married people can lead independent professional lives, and it is not a justice’s responsibility to police the actions of his or her spouse. But the brazenness with which the Thomases have flouted the most reasonable expectations of judicial rectitude is without precedent. From the Affordable Care Act to the Trump administration’s Muslim ban to the 2020 election challenges, Ms. Thomas has repeatedly embroiled herself in big-ticket legal issues and with litigants who have wound up before her husband’s court. All the while, he has looked the other way, refusing to recuse himself from any of these cases. For someone whose job is about judging, Justice Thomas has, in this context at least, demonstrated abominably poor judgment.
If Justice Thomas were sitting on any other federal court in the country, he would likely have been required by the code of judicial ethics to recuse himself many times over. But the code does not apply to Supreme Court justices, creating a situation in which the highest court in the land is also the most unaccountable.
This is not tolerable. For years, Congress has tried in vain to extend the ethics code to the Supreme Court. For the sake of fundamental fairness and consistency, the code must apply to all federal judges; it would at the very least force the hand of those like Justice Thomas who seem unmoved by any higher sense of duty to the institution or to the American people who have agreed to abide by its rulings.
The court is in deep trouble these days, pervaded by what Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently called the “stench” of partisanship — a stench arising in no small part from the Thomases’ behavior. It is hard to imagine that the other justices, regardless of their personal politics, aren’t bothered.
No one should have to choose between their devotion to their spouse and their duty to the nation. But Justice Thomas has shown himself unwilling or unable to protect what remains of the court’s reputation from the appearance of extreme bias he and his wife have created. He would do the country a service by stepping down and making room for someone who won’t have that problem.
This Justice Is Taking Over the Supreme Court, and He Won’t Be Alone
After he took his seat on the U.S. Supreme Court 30 years ago this month, Justice Clarence Thomas assured his law clerks, “I ain’t evolving.”
What he meant was that he would not soften his sharp conservative edges or change ideological stripes as did some of his fellow justices, including Harry Blackmun and David Souter.
Justice Thomas has certainly kept his vow. Indeed, some legal analysts say he is the most consistently conservative member of the court since the 1930s. He has written a raft of concurring and dissenting opinions that are so far to the right that it is common for him to issue them solo, without any of his colleagues signing on.
Now, with a new term underway, what is remarkable is the extent to which the Supreme Court, with the addition of three Donald Trump nominees who create a 6-to-3 conservative majority, seems to be reshaping itself in Justice Thomas’s image. With hot-button social issues on the docket, including gun rights, abortion rights and religious freedom, as well as a decision on whether to hear another big affirmative action case, we may be witnessing the emergence of the Thomas court.
It’s fool’s work to predict how individual justices will vote, but it’s not hard to make an educated guess in Justice Thomas’s case. The restrictive Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks (long before fetal viability), which is being challenged in a case this term, aligns with his dim view of abortion rights, as did an unsigned ruling recently issued by the court that declined to block Texas’ punitive and even more restrictive abortion law.
In the last significant Supreme Court victory for abortion rights, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, decided in 2016, Justice Thomas wrote a separate dissent (joined by no other justice) denouncing the court’s past rulings that upheld a woman’s right to abortion. “I write separately,” he noted, “to emphasize how today’s decision perpetuates the court’s habit of applying different rules to different constitutional rights — especially the putative right to abortion.” Emphasis on “putative.”
His low opinion of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established the right to abortion, emerged soon after he joined the court, despite his claim during his confirmation hearings that he could not recall ever discussing the case. In 1992, during his first term, the court decided the second most-important abortion rights case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld the constitutional right to abortion but allowed certain state restrictions. Justice Thomas signed on to separate dissenting opinions written by Justices William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia. (Justice Rehnquist said there was no “right of privacy,” contesting a central contention in Roe v. Wade, and Justice Scalia said abortion was not a protected constitutional right.)
Justice Thomas has been a stalwart champion of gun rights, too, chastising the lower courts and his fellow justices for showing lower regard for the Second Amendment than for other rights, like abortion. On Nov. 3, the justices will hear arguments in a case testing whether the Second Amendment protects a right to carry a gun outside the home for self-defense.
It’s easy to imagine that Justice Thomas would want to protect such a right. In 2008 and in 2010, he voted with the majority to allow guns in the home for self-defense. In 2020, he was irate after the court declined to hear an array of gun rights cases, including one challenging New Jersey’s restrictions on handgun permits.
“One would think that such an onerous burden on a fundamental right would warrant this Court’s review,” he wrote in a dissent. “But today, faced with a petition challenging just such a restriction on citizens’ Second Amendment rights, the court simply looks the other way.”
In religious freedom cases, Justice Thomas has stood out for his willingness to weaken the separation of church and state. Last year, he repeated his radical argument that the Establishment Clause doesn’t apply to the states. He even suggested that each state could establish an official state religion.
This term the court will decide whether it’s unlawful to prevent students participating in a financial-aid program from using the money to attend schools that provide religious instruction. Justice Thomas attended a variety of Catholic schools, and last month he spoke fondly of that education. “To this day I revere, admire and love my nuns,” he said in a talk at the University of Notre Dame. “They were devout, courageous and principled women.”
In another area where he has personal experience — he was admitted to Yale Law School after it adopted an affirmative action policy — the court could decide to hear a challenge to the admissions policy at Harvard. That case was brought by a group representing Asian American students who say that they were disadvantaged by the school’s consideration of race in admitting students.
It’s clear that Justice Thomas would take great satisfaction in writing an opinion eliminating affirmative action. In Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 case in which the Supreme Court upheld the use of race as a factor in student admissions, he wrote a dissenting opinion that said the policy, by discriminating on the basis of race, was a clear violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Several years into his Supreme Court tenure, Justice Thomas told the National Bar Association, a network of predominantly African-American attorneys and judges, that as a justice he would always “think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I’m Black.”
Those defiant words echoed his frustration after his 1991 confirmation hearings, when the law professor Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment nearly derailed his appointment. He’s been angry about those hearings ever since — he famously called them “a high-tech lynching” — and his opinions are noteworthy for the tone of outrage that suffuses them.
It is too early to know whether the members of the court’s conservative wing will vote as a bloc in any of the big cases this term, though in picking his new justices, Mr. Trump said that Justice Thomas was one of his models.
All eyes are on Chief Justice John Roberts, who may be emerging as the court’s swing vote. When a chief justice votes with the majority, he gets to pick who writes the decision; when he votes in dissent, he forfeits that prerogative, which goes to the senior justice in the majority. That would be Justice Thomas if Chief Justice Roberts sides with the three liberal justices in dissent.
Worried that the Supreme Court is seen as too political or ideological, a handful of justices, including Justice Thomas, fanned out before the current term began to make speeches insisting that they follow the law, not their personal beliefs. Recent opinion surveys show public trust in the court plummeting, in part because it is viewed as partisan.
That’s not likely to change if we’re entering the era of the Thomas court.
Biden Wants to Work With ‘the Other Side.’ This Supreme Court Battle Explains Why.
In the clash over Robert H. Bork’s nomination, Joe Biden’s moderate instincts defined a winning strategy.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. was on the brink of victory, but he was unsatisfied.
Mr. Biden, the 44-year-old chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was poised to watch his colleagues reject President Ronald Reagan’s formidable nominee to the Supreme Court, Robert H. Bork. The vote was unlikely to be close. Yet Mr. Biden was hovering in the Senate chamber, plying Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, a Republican of modestly conservative politics and regal bearing, with arguments about Bork’s record.
Rejecting a Supreme Court nominee was an extraordinary act of defiance, and Mr. Biden did not want a narrow vote that could look like an act of raw partisan politics.
“We already had Bork beat,” said Mark Gitenstein, who was then chief counsel to Mr. Biden’s committee. “But Biden really wanted to get Warner because he had such stature.”
Mr. Biden’s entreaties prevailed: Mr. Warner became one of 58 senators to vote against Bork, and one of six Republicans.
The Senate’s resounding rejection of Judge Bork in the fall of 1987 was a turning point, the first time it spurned a nominee to the high court for primarily ideological reasons. The vote ensured that the court’s swing seat would not go to a man with a long history of criticizing rulings on the rights of African-Americans and women. It also enraged a generation of conservatives and transformed the judge’s name into an ominous verb: Fearful of getting “Borked,” no nominee would ever again speak so freely about his views as Bork did.
The Senate’s resounding rejection of Judge Robert H. Bork in the fall of 1987 was a turning point, the first time it spurned a nominee to the high court for primarily ideological reasons.
It was also a personal turning point for Mr. Biden. In the Bork debate, Mr. Biden’s political ethos found its most vivid and successful expression.
A review of Mr. Biden’s conduct in the debate — including interviews with 16 people directly involved in the nomination fight, and a review of the hearings and Mr. Biden’s speeches — yielded a portrait of Mr. Biden as an ambitious young senator determined to achieve a vital liberal goal by decidedly unradical means.
The strategy Chairman Biden deployed then is the same one he is now proposing to bring to the White House as President Biden.
In the 1980s, as today, he saw bipartisan compromise not as a version of surrender, but as a vital tool for achieving Democratic goals.
Then, as now, Mr. Biden saw the culture and traditions of the Senate not as crippling obstacles, but as instruments that could be bent to his advantage.
And in both defining moments — his leadership of the Bork hearings and his third presidential campaign — Mr. Biden made persuading moderates, rather than exciting liberals, his guiding objective.
Mr. Biden, whose campaign declined to make him available for an interview, has strained to defend this approach in the 2020 presidential primary, offering only a halting rationale for a political worldview that other Democrats see as out of date. His rivals have branded him as a timid and even reactionary figure — a creature of the Senate cloakroom who partnered with former segregationists to pass draconian anti-crime legislation and joined with the business lobby to tighten bankruptcy laws.
And Mr. Biden’s opponents point not to the Bork hearings but a different confirmation battle as proof that his instincts are flawed. Four years after Bork was defeated, Mr. Biden would again take an accommodating approach to his Republican colleagues during Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings, allowing harsh and invasive questioning of Anita Hill, the law professor who accused the nominee of sexual harassment. Mr. Biden would later express “regret” for the treatment she endured.
But he has never regretted the conciliatory style that led him to triumph against Bork. In that process, every important decision Mr. Biden made was aimed at winning over conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans — men like Mr. Warner.
Now 92, Mr. Warner said in an interview that his memories of the Bork hearings had grown foggy over the years. But two impressions were indelible, he said. The first concerned Reagan’s nominee: “I never encountered a man with a shorter temper,” Mr. Warner said.
The second concerned the caliber of the Senate’s deliberations.
“It was a real, solid, good debate, led by Biden,” Mr. Warner said. “He showed extraordinary leadership.”
The outcome was not foreordained, for either Bork or Mr. Biden. The debate unfolded at a moment of humiliation for Mr. Biden, whose first campaign for president unraveled as the Bork hearings approached their climax. And the judge was no timid adversary, as the journalist Ethan Bronner wrote in a book on the nomination.
“Robert Bork,” Mr. Bronner wrote, “was a man of war.”
Mr. Biden was seated behind a desk in a spacious living room adjoining his study at his Wilmington, Del., home. A few aides sat or stood around the room, where pizza was in generous supply. Squared off against Mr. Biden was Robert H. Bork — or rather, a convincing simulacrum played by the constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe.
Mr. Tribe and Mr. Biden would spar for hours in a series of sessions that August, joined occasionally by other legal experts who would help Mr. Biden hone his queries on subjects from antitrust regulation to sexual privacy.
“Biden’s questions were really smart, and they also needed some sharpening,” Mr. Tribe said in an interview, citing Mr. Biden’s tendency to “ask one thing and mean something slightly different.”
Mr. Biden came to those training sessions by a jagged path, shaped by pressure from progressive activists and the delicate politics of the Judiciary Committee. He was arming himself to oppose Bork, but not with the methods of the left.
On the day Bork was nominated, liberals viewed Mr. Biden with suspicion. Taking over one of the Senate’s great committees at a boyish — for the Senate — age of 44, Mr. Biden had already split with progressives on the issue of busing as a means of desegregating schools. Until Bork, the authors Michael Pertschuk and Wendy Schaetzel would write, Mr. Biden “had been reluctant to challenge Reagan’s transformation of the federal judiciary.”
The previous November, the soon-to-be chairman had given liberals new reason for concern, suggesting to The Philadelphia Inquirer that he might one day vote to put Bork on the Supreme Court, should he be Reagan’s next nominee.
“I’m not Teddy Kennedy,” he told the newspaper.
When Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., a flexible conservative, resigned from the court in late June, Mr. Biden found himself in the shadow of Kennedy, the party’s leading liberal, and laboring to reconcile his own moderate instincts with a mood of alarm on the left. When the White House announced Bork’s nomination on the first day of July, Kennedy delivered a thunderous warning from the Senate floor: In “Robert Bork’s America,” Kennedy said,
- “women would be forced into back-alley abortions,
- blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters.”
The scathing address was a call to arms for the left, and it helped animate a coalition of progressives — led by feminists, civil rights activists and labor unions — that applied pressure to undecided senators throughout the summer.
“His record was so extensive, and it touched almost every issue of importance to American life,” said Nan Aron, a leading anti-Bork activist. “It wasn’t simply a single issue that caused people to be alarmed.”
Another purpose of Kennedy’s speech, his allies have said, was to ensure Mr. Biden would not cave.
“One of the reasons for ‘Robert Bork’s America’ was to freeze Biden,” Jeffrey Blattner, a Kennedy aide, would say decades later, in an oral history for the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. “He’s running for president. We didn’t want to leave him any choice.”
Mr. Biden quickly aligned himself with Kennedy, and, at his liberal colleague’s urging, secured an agreement from Senator Strom Thurmond — the 84-year-old former segregationist who was the Judiciary Committee’s top Republican — to delay Bork’s hearings until September.
“Biden was under a lot of pressure, particularly from the liberal senators,” said former Senator Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, a centrist Democrat who said he began the confirmation process favorably disposed toward Bork. “At first, I was leaning strongly to vote for him.”
Even as he pledged to oppose Bork, Mr. Biden made clear to progressive leaders in a private meeting that he saw his role as sharply distinct from theirs. He would play an inside game aimed at swaying Senate moderates, starting with the four undecided members of his committee:
- Mr. DeConcini and two other Democrats,
- Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia and
- Howell Heflin of Alabama, and a Republican,
- Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.
Ralph Neas, a civil rights activist who joined the liberals’ initial meeting with Mr. Biden, said the chairman conveyed “that he would take the lead and we would try to put together a bipartisan coalition.”
“Biden’s street cred with a lot of the centrists was quite high,” Mr. Neas said.
Mr. Biden was blunter with his aides: He would not adopt Kennedy’s rhetoric or make abortion his central cause. According to a book Mr. Gitenstein published in 1992 about the confirmation fight, Mr. Biden feared Bork would overturn Roe v. Wade but told aides he did not see the case as “great constitutional law.” More disturbing to him — and, he believed, more likely to sway undecided voters — was a Connecticut case on contraception that revealed Bork’s doubts about a broader right to privacy.
“It really concerns me more than abortion,” Mr. Biden is quoted as saying in the book.
In their sessions, Mr. Tribe said, the future vice president wrestled not just with Bork’s record but also with the idea of disqualifying nominees based on individual issues.
“I remember pushing back on Biden, saying, ‘If you think Roe v. Wade really ought to be the law of the land, shouldn’t that count?’” Mr. Tribe recalled. “He said, ‘Yes, it should count a lot, but I still don’t want to have a flat litmus test.’”
Mr. Tribe remembered thinking: “This guy’s a little bit more cautious than I am. But that’s fine, he’s playing a different role.”
Mr. Biden’s self-assigned role was readily apparent as the Bork hearings began in mid-September. Beaming down at the judge from a crowded dais, Mr. Biden praised him as man of towering achievement and “provocative” views. Flanked by Kennedy at one elbow and Thurmond at the other, Mr. Biden said the hearings should not be “clouded by strident rhetoric from the far left or the far right.”
“Anytime you feel you want to expand on an answer, you are not bound by time,” Mr. Biden encouraged Bork, adding in a tone of levity, “Go ahead and bog us down.”
In the Bork hearings, every important decision Mr. Biden made was aimed at winning over conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans.
In the Bork hearings, every important decision Mr. Biden made was aimed at winning over conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans.CreditJoseThe judge, bearded and broad shouldered, did not recognize the trap.
Few men could have been more prepared to face a constitutional interrogation. A former Yale Law School professor who served as the country’s solicitor general and, amid the maelstrom of Watergate, as acting attorney general, Bork brought to the hearings a reputation for quick eloquence and utter mastery of the law.
Mr. Biden had no such reputation, and the columnist George F. Will spoke for much of Washington when he predicted Bork would be “more than a match for Biden.”
The chairman gave his colleagues wide latitude to question Bork, whose testimony consumed five days. It culminated in an unusual Saturday hearing that was dominated by an hourslong debate between Bork and Specter, a former district attorney who frequently rode the Amtrak rails with Mr. Biden, about the meaning of constitutional intent. Mr. Biden had offered Specter half an hour for his questions; when Specter balked at the time limit, Mr. Biden relented and opened the way for a crucial exchange.
“His debate with my father on constitutional law did reveal him to be not sufficiently respectful of precedent, which pushed my father against him, and pushed other swing senators against him,” said Shanin Specter, the senator’s son and a Philadelphia lawyer. “It would not have happened if Biden, as chair, hadn’t permitted the hearings to go exactly as long as they needed to go.”
Mr. Biden sought, too, to quash attacks on Bork that he saw as risking political backlash. He shot down a plan to ambush Bork with a recording of a speech he gave in 1985, insisting on sharing it with the judge before airing it in the committee. And Mr. Biden and his aides refused a request from a number of prominent activists, including Ralph Nader, to testify in opposition to Bork. The left was applying powerful pressure from outside the Senate, but Mr. Biden preferred that its leaders stay there — on the outside.
Ms. Aron, who would later clash with Mr. Biden over the nomination of Justice Thomas in 1991, said the combination of popular pressure on the Senate and Mr. Biden’s high-minded hearings doomed the nominee.
“What defeated Robert Bork was public pressure,” Ms. Aron said. “But what allowed the public to engage was a review of Bork’s record.”
And Bork did himself few favors: While he assured senators, in his rumbling voice, that he would not overturn rulings capriciously, he struggled to explain away past comments decrying “dozens” of shoddy Supreme Court decisions or deriding the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or ridiculing the concept of a constitutional right to privacy. He startled even some allies by describing as “troublesome” the reasoning behind a 1954 case desegregating public schools in the nation’s capital.
In his questions, Mr. Biden posed as a mere mortal grappling with the ideas of a giant.
“Clearly, I do not want to get into a debate with a professor,” Mr. Biden stressed, prodding Mr. Bork about the Griswold v. Connecticut case that ended a state prohibition on birth control: “As I hear you, you do not believe there is a general right of privacy that is in the Constitution.”
“Not one derived in that fashion,” Bork said of the popular decision. “There may be other arguments, and I do not want to pass upon those.”
Watching Bork’s testimony, his political backers knew he was losing. He was articulate, but he was also argumentative. His knowledge of the law was powerful, his political antennae were not.
“I can’t blame Biden,” reflected Tom Korologos, the Republican lobbyist tasked with ushering Bork onto the court. “I blame Bork and Specter, and the other senators, for going on and on.”
Every swing vote on Mr. Biden’s committee swung against Bork, sending him to the floor with a negative recommendation by a vote of 9 to 5. The White House offered Bork the chance to withdraw; he chose martyrdom instead.
His supporters gave him that much, accusing Bork’s opponents of bowing to activists like Mr. Neas and Ms. Aron. “The man’s been trashed in our house,” Senator John Danforth, Republican of Missouri, lamented on the Senate floor. “Some of us helped generate the trashing. Others of us yielded to it.”
Mr. Biden called Mr. Danforth’s complaint an insult to the Senate.
“I have a higher opinion of the ability of my colleagues to do what’s right than, apparently, the senator from Missouri does,” he said.
Mr. Biden’s approach to the Bork nomination was a legislative and political success, one he experienced as personal redemption after his presidential candidacy crumbled. It brought to maturity the strategic instincts that defined him in subsequent battles — including his contested stewardship of the Thomas hearings — and that shape his candidacy today.
The fate of Mr. Biden’s campaign, and perhaps a future presidency, may hinge on whether that version of leadership, defined by collegiality and adherence to procedure, can inspire Democrats and coax cooperation from Republicans. In the presidential race, there is no Ted Kennedy to sound a trumpet for the left while Mr. Biden plays a methodical inside game. And there are no Republicans to be found in the Senate like Specter, who eventually, at Mr. Biden’s urging, quit the G.O.P. to become a Democrat before his death in 2012.
Still, Mr. Gitenstein said he had encouraged the former vice president to draw public attention to his role in the 1987 court fight. The defeat of Robert Bork averted a solidly conservative majority, handing the court’s decisive seat to the more pliant Anthony M. Kennedy, who became a decisive figure in a generation’s worth of eclectic rulings on subjects from campaign finance and union rights to abortion and the legal definition of marriage.
“I don’t think he or anyone else makes enough of the fact that, but for Biden, Roe would be dead 30 years ago, and, but for Biden, we wouldn’t have the gay marriage decision,” Mr. Gitenstein said. “I’ve talked to him about it. He’s got so much on his platter.”
Mr. DeConcini, who at 82 is a supporter of Mr. Biden’s campaign, said he hoped a strategy of moderation could prevail again.
But he admitted to having doubts.
“I’d like to think so, I really would,” Mr. DeConcini said. “I’m just not sure.”