Vice President Joe Biden said Monday that an excerpt of a speech he gave in 1992 about opposing a hypothetical Supreme Court nomination in an election year was “not an accurate description of my views.”
“It is my view that if a Supreme Court Justice resigns tomorrow or within the next several weeks or resigns at the end of the summer, President Bush should consider following the practice of a majority of his predecessors and not, and not name a nominee until after the November election is completed,” Biden says in the speech, which was posted by C-SPAN.
Sen. Joe Biden in 1992 says President Bush should “not name a nominee until after the November election…” #SCOTUShttps://t.co/setQGLzePt
— CSPAN (@cspan) February 22, 2016
In a statement provided to The Hill, Biden said that in the speech he also encouraged the Senate and the President to “work together to overcome partisan differences” and bring about a functioning court, a position he said he maintains today.
“While some say that my comments in June 1992 contributed to a more politicized nomination process, they didn’t prevent the Senate from fulfilling its constitutional duties, because there was no vacancy at the time,” Biden said in the statement.
Let’s assume a hypothetical: During the last year of W.'s presidency, Justice Ginsberg announces his retirement. Does anyone think that Republicans wouldn’t have insisted on the nomination and voting process going forward? More to the point, does anyone think the Democrats would have announced that they would not even consider any Bush nominee? Let’s stop the “he said, he said” nonsense.
Biden could have pointed out that, unlike President Obama, President Bush was then engaged in an active campaign for re-election.
But he should also have said, “I was wrong,” even though, had a vacancy occurred in June 1992 or later, as a practical matter it would have been doubtful that a nominee could have been selected and confirmed by Election Day.
The GOP is just stalling and will get a judge they like even less in 2017. The irish betting site PaddyPower is nails predicting this stuff. They have HRC ahead by a very large margin right now.
http://www.paddypower.com/bet/other-politics/us-politics/Winner-2016-US-Presidential-Election-4146711.html
Let’s see the context for the quote. Seems pertinent.
There was no need in 1992 for Biden to hypothesize about this. Hillary can be infuriatingly cagey, but this is precisely why: you never know what will happen and when an apparently inconsequential bit of thinking out loud will come back to bite you.