Okay, this is news from 2005. As Joseph Epstein reminds us in his Wall Street Journal column today (nicely titled “The Unbearable Lightness of Biden”):
[Joe Biden] considers himself a champion of African-Americans, yet he eulogized Sen. Robert Byrd, a Klansman in his youth, and the longtime segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond. The man who now promises to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court is the same man who warned in 2005 that if President Bush nominated Judge Janice Rogers Brown, “I can assure you that would be a very, very, very difficult fight and she probably would be filibustered.”
In his typical bumbling fashion, Biden actually botched his filibuster threat—he couldn’t keep those female judges straight—and had to correct it. Here’s the excerpt from the “Face the Nation” transcript from July 3, 2005:
Sen. BIDEN: And so I did not want to limit it to the committee but I did–that did not mean that if you let it out of committee that you weren’t eligible to filibuster it. And–but I have no intention of filibustering, but he–it depends on who the president sends. But I could see a circumstance–for example, if he sent up Edith Jones I can assure you that would be a very, very, very difficult fight and she probably would be filibustered.
Ms. GREENBURG: What about…
ROBERTS: Well, what…
Ms. GREENBURG: …Janice Rogers Brown, someone else?
Sen. BIDEN: Excuse me. I’m not–by the way, I misspoke. I misspoke. Janice Rogers Brown is what I meant to say.
Don’t let Biden apologists pretend that Biden was just predicting a filibuster and not clearly threatening it. In a Senate with 55 Republicans, it is absurd to think that a filibuster might have succeeded without Biden’s support. Biden was one of 25 Democrats who tried to filibuster Samuel Alito’s nomination, so he was hardly someone who would have been among the six votes needed to defeat a filibuster of Brown.
Biden and other Democrats, it’s worth emphasizing, so vigorously opposed Janice Rogers Brown in part because of her race and (to a lesser degree) her sex. They opposed her because of her judicial philosophy but their opposition was intensified because they especially despised the prospect of a libertarian conservative justice who was a black female.