Biden Blocked Dozens of GOP Judicial Nominees from Hearings in Election Year

We've being hearing a whole lot of fake outrage claiming that not even scheduling hearings on a judicial nominee is unprecedented. It's not unprecedented. In election years, it's practically the norm, as Marc A. Thiessen at WaPo lists.

Biden’s record of election-year judicial obstruction came to light in 1997, when he tried to force then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms to hold a hearing on the nomination of Massachusetts Gov. William Weld to be U.S. ambassador to Mexico (I was on Helms’s committee staff at the time). When Helms declared Weld’s nomination dead on arrival, Biden and other committee members forced Helms to convene a committee meeting, which they hoped would take up Weld’s nomination.

Instead, Helms turned the meeting into a lecture on the “History of Presidential Nominees Not Receiving Confirmation Hearings.” He presented 10 pages of charts prepared by CRS detailing 154 presidential nominations during the previous decade that had been killed without a hearing — including dozens of judicial nominations that Biden had killed.

When challenged by Helms on his record, Biden explained that the nominees in his case were different than Weld’s, because they were nominated in an election year.

Not unprecedented at all.

According to a report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), in 1992 Biden killed the nominations of 32 Bush appointees to the federal bench without giving them so much as a hearing. And that does not count an additional 20 nominations for the federal bench where Biden did not hold hearings that year, which CRS excluded from its count because they reached the Senate “within approximately [four] months before it adjourned.”

So none were cases in which time simply ran out. There was plenty of time to consider the nominations. But Biden refused. Why? According to an article in Texas Lawyer magazine, cited in the CRS report, some of the “nominees reportedly fell victim to presidential election year politics, as Democrats hoped to preserve vacancies in expectation that their presidential candidate would win election.”

That’s not all. In 1988, then-Chairman Biden also killed the nominations of nine candidates for the federal bench appointed by President Ronald Reagan without so much as a hearing. The New York Times reported at the time that “Democrats were determined to bury” some of the nominations because, as one liberal lobbyist told the paper, “the appellate seats were too precious to for us to give up” in a presidential election year.

If appellate seats are too precious to give up, what about a Supreme Court seat?

Some of the nominees Biden killed that election year had been nominated as early as January 1991 — 17 months before the presidential election. And some of the nominees he killed in 1998 had been nominated as early as February 1987 — 16 months before voters went to the polls to choose a new president.

And speaking of the Supreme Court, Biden did his best to block John Roberts from moving upward. This was a typical tactic that Senate Dems used to block potential Supreme Court nominees by preventing them from being in position to be nominated. Think of this as a chess game.

Biden refused to even hold a hearing on Roberts’s nomination, much less a vote in committee or on the Senate floor. Roberts’s nomination died in committee and was withdrawn on Oct. 8, 1992. It was only about a decade later that he was re-nominated to the federal bench by President George W. Bush — and we all know the rest of the story.

The precedent is there. If Democrats want to be outraged, they can be outraged by themselves.