Paul Kengor, who has written a bunch for National Review over the years, has an important piece in the National Catholic Register that provides a troubling account of Joe Biden’s enthusiasm for Roe v. Wade. Kengor delved into Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate, the memoirs of the late Warren Rudman — the Republican who represented New Hampshire from 1980 to 1993 and who championed Supreme Court Justice David Souter — to recount his description of a Wilmington, Del., train-platform bump-into with Biden on the 1992 day the Supreme Court handed down its consequential Casey decision:
At first, I didn’t see Joe; then I spotted him waving at me from far down the platform. . . . Joe had agonized over his vote for David, and I knew how thrilled he must be. We started running through the crowd toward each other, and when we met, we embraced, laughing and crying.
Why the tears of joy? Souter’s was Casey’s fifth vote to keep Roe from being overturned. Per Kengor: “Biden wept tears of joy in the arms of Rudman, shouting triumphantly of Souter: ‘You were right about him! You were right!’”
Souter had been the “trust me” nominee: Conservatives had been assured by Bush-administration officials that the New Hampshire judge with a thin record was going to be a stealth surprise, the happy kind. And confirmable. Meanwhile, Rudman, a fervent Roe defender, was telling Biden, who was chairing the Judiciary Committee, and his fellow Democrats that Souter would not disappoint them if and when a major abortion case came before the High Court — but that collegial, trust-me assurance had to remain private.
Back to the train platform, from Kengor:
The two men were so jubilant, so giddy, that Rudman said onlookers thought they were crazy: “But we just kept laughing and yelling and hugging each other because, sometimes, there are happy endings.”
Not for the tens of millions of unborn children who have been aborted since that day.
I’ve written elsewhere about incidents that expose the disturbing aspects of Joe Biden’s psyche. None of them comes close to what one might conclude from his public tears of joy over the Casey verdict.