Tag Archives: Joe Biden

national news, political news

Don’t look for these rivals to make up

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Recent political history is full of examples of how rivals for the presidency have said means and occasionally disgusting things to and about each other … and then hooked up as allies.

In 1960, U.S. Sens. John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson fought each other for the Democratic presidential nomination. JFK was nominated and then picked LBJ to run with him. They won the election and the rest is, well, history.

Twenty years later, former Gov. Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush battled for the 1980 Republican nomination, with Bush labeling Reagan’s tax plan as “voodoo economics.” Reagan won the GOP nod and then picked Bush to run alongside him as vice president.

In 2008, the combatants were Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden fighting for the Democratic nomination. Biden dropped out, Obama won the nomination and picked Biden to run with him. President-elect Obama then turned to another campaign rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and selected her to be secretary of state.

In 2016, well, matters are quite a bit different.

The battlers this time are Donald J. Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz. They are fighting for the Republican nomination.

The gloves are off. The brass knuckles are on. The men loathe each other. Trump calls Cruz “Lyin’ Ted.” Cruz is now responding with attacks on Trump, referring to him as a “pathological liar” and a “serial philanderer.”

Trump now says that Cruz’s father might have been a principal — are you ready for this one? — in the assassination of President Kennedy. Cruz’s response was classic: “Let’s be clear: This is nuts. This is not a reasonable position. This is kooky,” Cruz said in Evansville, Ind. “While I’m at it, I should go ahead and admit yes, my dad killed JFK, he is secretly Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa is buried in his backyard.”

Cruz is likely to get battered badly in today’s Indiana GOP primary. He’s going all-out against Trump. The men seem to truly despise each other.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/05/03/bracing-indiana-loss-cruz-unloads-trump/

Trying to predict any outcome in this year’s wacky presidential contest is a dicey proposition at best.

I feel comfortable, though, in asserting that Trump and Cruz will not team up for the fall campaign.

legal news, national news, political news

If only the VP hadn’t said what he said …

Supreme-Court-blue-sky

Vice President Joe Biden delivered a stern message today to some university students and faculty members

about the obstruction occurring in the U.S. Senate.

It’s threatening the core of our republic, he said. Senate Republicans must not obstruct President Obama’s effort to fill a Supreme Court vacancy; they must allow nominee Merrick Garland to have a hearing, then they must debate the merits of his nomination and they must then vote on it.

True enough, Mr. Vice President.

But what about those remarks you made in 1992 about whether President George H.W. Bush should be able to nominate someone to the high court in an election year? Today’s Republicans are seeking to block Obama’s pick because this, too, is an election year and they want the next president to make the selection.

The GOP has beaten the vice president over his remarks then.

What they don’t say is that Biden also declared that he would support a “consensus candidate” in an election if one were to be presented to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Biden chaired at the time.

Biden told the Georgetown law students and faculty members: “Dysfunction and partisanship are bad enough on Capitol Hill. But we can’t let the Senate spread that dysfunction to another branch of government, to the Supreme Court of the United States.”

It’s fascinating to me that then-Sen. Biden’s remarks now have become known as the “Biden Rule,” which has never existed.

I won’t defend Biden for making his remarks in 1992. He was wrong to suggest that a sitting president shouldn’t be allowed to perform his job if he had been given the chance to do so. President Bush did select a Supreme Court justice in 1991, when he nominated Clarence Thomas to take the seat vacated by the death of Thurgood Marshall.

However, I won’t condemn Biden for holding that view. He did, after all, add the caveat that he would support a consensus candidate for the Supreme Court.

The here and now stands on its own.

The vice president is correct to insist that today’s Senate should stop its obstruction and allow the president to fulfill his constitutional duty — and do its own duty to give an eminently qualified nominee the fair hearing he deserves.

 

legal news, national news, political news

Listen to the VP, senators, about doing your job

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biden

Vice President Joe Biden is going to lecture the U.S. Senate on something about which knows a thing or two.

He wants his former colleagues to do the job they took an oath to do, which is vote on whether to approve a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Biden will deliver his message in remarks at Georgetown University.

At issue is the nomination of Merrick Garland to fill the seat vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia. Senate Republicans — many of them, anyway — are digging in on the nomination. They don’t want to consider a Barack Obama appointment, contending that it’s too late in the president’s second term. He’s a “lame duck,” therefore, the task of appointing a justice should fall on the next president.

That, of course, is pure malarkey.

Barack Obama is president until Jan. 20, 2017. He wants to fulfill his constitutional duty and he’s urging the Senate to do so as well.

Oh sure. The balance of the court is hanging here. Scalia was a devout conservative ideologue — and a brilliant legal scholar. Garland is a judicial moderate; he’s also a scholar; a man viewed widely as supremely qualified.

How does Biden — who served in the Senate for 36 years before being elected vice president — figure in this?

As vice president, he’s the presiding officer of the Senate. Of course, he votes only to break ties. He doesn’t actually run the place. That task falls on the majority leader, who happens to be a Republican, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

It’s been McConnell’s call to obstruct this nomination.

Biden, though, does have a number of friends in both parties who serve in the Senate. Is there any hope that he can get through to them? Probably not, but when you’re vice president of the United States, you have the bully pulpit from which to preach an important message to those who need to hear it.

 

legal news, national news, political news

Oh, that silly thing called ‘public comment’

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A member of my family challenged me earlier today to recall a statement from a politician that seemed to contradict what President Obama has said about his upcoming nomination for someone to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The president wants the Republican-controlled Senate to give the nominee a fair and thorough hearing and then a vote in a “timely fashion.” Democrats are angry that GOP senators are pledging that whoever gets the nod won’t get a committee hearing, let alone a vote.

One of those angry Democrats is Vice President Joe Biden.

Oh, but wait. He said something different in 1992 when a Republican was president. Then-Sen. Biden said President George H.W. Bush shouldn’t get a Supreme Court nominee approved in an election year.

My family member brought that statement to my attention and asked me whether I opposed it then.

My answer? I couldn’t remember the statement, let alone what I thought about it at the time.

White House defends Biden

The vice president has said that the statement has been “taken out of context.” Biden says that he added later in his Senate floor remarks that he’d consider a nominee if he or she were a moderate; Biden chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time.

I, too, believe the Senate should consider a presidential appointment to the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Which brings me back to where we started.

We hear so many things through so many channels, venues, forums and information-delivery systems that most of us can’t remember who said what, when they said it and in what context they said it.

If I’d heard it at the time I likely would have condemned it. However, that’s a hypothetical event, which politicians say they dislike. I’ll concede that I probably didn’t hear Sen. Biden say what he’s now acknowledged he said.

Sure, Biden would be wrong — if he favored obstructing future high court nominations and left it at that. He says now he had more to say than what’s being reported.

Fine …

None of this justifies today’s Senate leadership vow to obstruct the current president from filling a seat on the Supreme Court.

legal news, national news, political news

Justice Biden? Maybe?

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I’ll toss a name out there for President Obama to consider for the vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Joseph Biden.

The vice president told Rachel Maddow last night that he has “no interest” in serving on the court. The MSNBC host had asked him directly if he’d consider the appointment if it were offered. He has “no interest.”

Is that a blanket, categorical refusal to serve? No. It isn’t. It means, more or less, the same thing as when a politician says he has “no intention of running” for a particular office.

“No intention” can be parsed to mean that “no intention … at this moment.” So, when a politician says he or she has “no interest” in a particular job, one can possibly suggest that the pol is speaking in the present tense.

Biden predicted that Obama will pick a centrist. He said the president won’t likely pick a flaming liberal jurist in the mold of William Brennan to fill the seat vacated by shocking death of archconservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

He’s also said that a nominee should have GOP support.

Hmmm. Let me think. Who might that be?

Oh, how about the vice president? He’s got many Republican friends in the Senate. He’s proven his ability to work well with GOP lawmakers. He once chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee.

My hunch is that he’d be more of a moderate than a flamer.

OK, he’s also pretty long in the tooth. He might not want to stay in the public eye. The vice president has had a long public service career — and he’s just lost his beloved son, Beau, to cancer. Not only that, the president has given him a task to lead the effort to find a cure for the killer disease.

However, as a fan of the vice president, I happen to think he might be one court candidate who could pass senatorial muster.

 

legal news, national news, political news

Obama should have decided to attend funeral

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chapman.0830 - 08/29/05 - A Supreme Court headed by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has questions for Chapman University Law School professor John Eastman as he and California Attorney General Bill Lockyer argue the 1905 ''Lochner v. State of New York'' case during a re-enactment Monday afternoon at Chapman University. (Credit: Mark Avery/Orange County Register/ZUMA Press)

No one asked me for advice on this, but I’ll offer it unsolicited — and without reservation.

President Obama should have decided to attend the funeral this weekend for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

To me, it’s a no-brainer.

The president will not attend. Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, are going to attend, as they share Scalia’s Catholic faith.

But look at it this way. The optics of seeing the president of the United States paying his respects at the funeral of someone with whom he had profound political and judicial disagreements are invaluable.

Yes, the president will attend a ceremony at the Supreme Court building to honor the late justice. He also has been quite gracious in his public comments in reaction to the shocking news of Scalia’s death while on a hunting trip in West Texas.

Indeed, some on the right have given Obama a pass on attending. Scalia’s own son even has suggested that the president made the right call by deciding against attending the justice’s funeral.

However, Obama has given his fierce critics in the conservative media ammunition now to fire at him for declining to attend the funeral. White House press officials haven’t disclosed how the president will spend Saturday while much of official Washington and the nation’s legal community is honoring the memory of Justice Scalia. My hope is that he lays low and spends it quietly.

He’s got a huge decision to make — possibly within the next few days. It involves his choice to succeed Scalia — a gigantic and booming voice for conservatives on the court. Senate Republicans don’t even want to consider an appointment. Others insist that the president make the choice. I am one of those who believes the president should fulfill his duties by selecting a nominee for the high court.

OK, so no one asked me for my opinion about the funeral. Why should they? I’m way out yonder in the political peanut gallery far from the government epicenter.

It’s just that as someone noted in the link attached to this blog post indicated, if you’re questioning whether you should go to the funeral … go to the funeral.

national news, political news

Hey, Hillary . . . it’s time for a message

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Chris Hayes is a smart young analyst who works for MSNBC.

Last night he offered a most interesting assessment of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign.

It’s that she lacks a message.

Hayes noted that U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ big win in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday came because of his clear mantra: He intends to break up the big banks and drive relentlessly for income equality.

I’m not endorsing or condemning Sanders’ overarching theme. It’s clear as a bell, however.

Hayes’ assessment of Clinton’s message? It’s that she’ll do a good job and that she’s well-prepared to be president of the United States of America.

“That’s not a message,” Hayes said.

Bingo, young man!

She now finds herself playing catch-up with Sanders, who walloped Clinton among young voters who — I should add — appeared to actually turn out Tuesday to vote for their candidates.

It wasn’t Clinton.

Should Clinton be in panic mode? I’m thinking she has time to pull it together.

South Carolina is the next stop on the presidential primary parade route. The former senator/secretary of state can harvest plenty of votes there from a huge African-American base. Here is where she needs to enlist some serious help from her husband, the 42nd and unofficial “first black president” of the United States.

Clinton can paper over all she wants about the expected outcome in New Hampshire. The truth is she got walloped.

Chris Hayes had it right. She lacks a coherent message that resonates with voters who have a serious gripe about what they perceive is wrong with the political system.

Oh, I know too that she’s got those other issues hanging over her. Those e-mails, Benghazi, a perceived lack of authenticity . . . blah, blah, blah.

This once-invincible candidate is now looking, well, a lot less formidable.

Are you standing by, Vice President Joe Biden?

 

medical news, national news

‘Moonshot’ cancer initiative must go beyond Obama years

Vice President Joe Biden points at President Barack Obama during the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2016. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, Pool)

Why do I get this nagging knot in my gut that President Obama’s so-called “moonshot” effort to find a cure for cancer isn’t getting enough attention on an important aspect of it?

It will have to continue long past the day that Barack Obama leaves the White House for the final time as president.

He turned to Vice President Biden during his State of the Union speech and made Biden the leader of the effort to find a cure for cancer. The president now wants to commit $1 billion toward that goal.

But the 44th president has less than a year to go. There won’t be a cure found before he leaves office. Who’s going to keep fighting that fight? Who’s going to lead the effort?

Would it be Biden, who leaves office the same day as Barack Obama? It ought to be.

We all know someone who’s been affected by this killer. Many of us have endured treatment and therapy ourselves.

There’s certain to be opposition to the president’s call for such a major expenditure. My hope is that we can muster the kind of national will that we managed to find for the actual moonshot initiative launched by President Kennedy in 1961.

According to The Hill: “In any type of major ambitious efforts, unless you set your sights high, you’re almost guaranteed to not get to the type of success that we all want,” an administration official said. “There’s a reason the vice president is aspiring big, it’s the only way we’re going to push the envelope and make this kind of progress.”

True enough. This project, though, is going to require a lot of attention that must persist long after the current administration leaves office.

Whoever succeeds Barack Obama has to commit with the same fervor to the fight to cure cancer.

One demonstration of that commitment would be to keep Joe Biden on the job.

 

national news, political news

What if . . . Clinton loses first two contests?

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All right, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time once again for a little game of “What If?”

The Iowa caucuses are coming up. They’ll be followed immediately by the New Hampshire primary.

Forget about the Republicans for a moment. Let’s ponder the Democratic contest.

What if Hillary Rodham Clinton gets thumped in Iowa? She’s leading in that state — supposedly — but the margin is diminishing. Bernie Sanders might be within the statistical margin of error.

If she loses Iowa, then what if she gets pummeled in New Hampshire? Polls in the Granite State show Sanders with a huge — and growing — lead.

OK, then comes South Carolina. What if by some chance Clinton loses there, too? Momentum has a way of dictating how these things go. The e-mail controversy is beginning to swirl once again.

Clinton once was seen as the probable next president. Now? Well, she’s less probable by a good bit than before.

Are the Democrats going to nominate a “democratic socialist” who’ll turn 75 by the time of the next inaugural? Do they really want to fritter away a chance at keeping the White House in an election when the GOP is likely to nominate either a bombastic real estate mogul/reality TV star or a junior U.S. senator from Texas who no one who works with him seems to respect, let alone like?

Oh, yes. There’s another guy. The vice president of the United States, took himself out of the running. Joe Biden said he had “run out of time,” only to declare just a few days ago that he “regrets” not running, even though he said the decision was the “right one.”

Regret making the right decision?

Hmmm. Sounds to me as though regret might override right, if the once-presumed frontrunner keeps stumbling.

This election season has been full of craziness. Who’s the say there isn’t room for a little more of it?

 

national news, political news

Biden bows out with class, grace

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Vice President Joe Biden said a lot of things this morning when he bid farewell to any chance of becoming president of the United States.

I want to focus on one of those things.

He seemed to fire a shot across Hillary Rodham Clinton’s bow after the Democratic Party presidential frontrunner alluded to Republicans as her worst “enemy.”

Not so, said Joe.

Republicans aren’t the enemy. They are political adversaries, he said. He also noted that he retains many friends on the GOP side of the aisle and he indicated to whomever is elected president next year that the way to move the country forward is to end this kind of proverbial political hate speech emanating from both sides of the divide.

I don’t know who started this bitter rhetoric. At this point, I don’t really care. It’s gone on long enough.

The vice president’s call for a more civil discussion is precisely the kind of thing some of us out here have yearned for.

Biden: I will not be silent

Joe Biden is an honorable man. He has his faults, as does every human being who’s ever walked the planet.

The vice president’s “friends” on Fox News, for example, spent some time noting how he got caught during the 1988 presidential campaign stealing speech lines from British politician Neal Kinnock.

Over the years, the vice president’s verbosity has gotten him into trouble. I recall, for example, when CNN put a timer on him while he was supposed to be asking Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito a question during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Biden rambled on for 28 minutes, giving Alito precisely two minutes to answer a question that finally — finally! — came out of the then-senator’s mouth.

But the vice president has served his nation with honor and with great conviction. He’s also weathered intense personal grief, starting with the death of his wife and daughter in that terrible car crash between the time of his 1972 election to the Senate and when he took office; then this year he mourned the death of his beloved son, Beau, from brain cancer.

He’s also sought to mind his manners — most of the time — when talking about policy differences with his Republican opponents.

Message to the politicians who’ll be around when Joe Biden departs the scene in January 2017: How about taking the hint that the vice president dropped on you today? Let’s cut the “enemy” crap.

Well stated, Mr. Vice President.