Joe Biden’s candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the presidency should bring forth serious re-consideration of his long political career. In other words, what has he done for us, or better against us?
A review of Biden’s career sheds some light on how we got some of the problems that bedevil American society today. In the 1980s Joe joined with several others to wrest control of the Democratic party and shift it from its liberal orientation.
Their vehicle was the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), founded in 1985 by Democratic operatives Al From and Will Marshall, and such Democratic leaders as Governors Bill Clinton (Arkansas), Chuck Robb (Virginia), Bruce Babbit (Arizona), and Lawton Chiles (Florida), and Senators Joe Biden of Delaware, Al Gore of Tennessee, Sam Nunn of Georgia and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.
They successfully took control of the Democratic Party and pushed aside liberal leaders such as Mario Cuomo and Jesse Jackson. Elected president in 1992, Clinton proceeded to govern from a more conservative position than Democrats had followed in many years.
In 1996, Charles Murray’s decade-plus campaign to end welfare for single mothers paid off when President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (TANF), essentially killing traditional welfare programs with a specific emphasis on cutting welfare for poor families with children.
Biden was a strong supporter for Clinton’s so-called “welfare reform” program which ended the federal government’s 60-year commitment to direct provision of aid to poor people. As a result, today, single mothers in America have the least social welfare support in the developed world.
With his 1994 $30 billion crime bill—enacted as the crime rate was decreasing–Bill Clinton caused the most substantial increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. Although he did not declare the War on Crime or the War on Drugs, he escalated it beyond what many conservatives had imagined possible.
Biden had helped set the stage for Clinton by working with Senator Strom Thurmond to produce legislation in 1986 and 1988 that created the absurdly large disparities in sentences for crack and powder cocaine. This may have been one of the first steps in creating the mass incarceration problem.
Two weeks after Clinton signed his crime bill in September 1994, he enacted the Riegle-Neal interstate banking bill, the first in a series of moves deregulating the financial industry—a move much appreciated by Wall Street.
Biden is currently pushing himself as a friend of workers; however, he was right there as President Clinton moved against trade unions. As a result, union membership sank from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to less than 12 percent today.
But I view Biden’s worst sin as putting Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court. As chair of the Judiciary Committee, he permitted Republican Senators to attack Anita Hill when she testified against Thomas and then adjourned the hearing while two other females who had worked for Thomas at the EEOC were waiting to testify and support Hill’s accusations against Thomas.
Thomas was confirmed by the narrowest of margins in over 100 years, 52-48. Many of us believe that if these other women had testified that margin would have disappeared and Thomas would not have been confirmed, and the country is worse off because of him.
One observer said early on that Thomas had done more damage, more quickly, than any Supreme Court justice in history.
Joe Biden has a lot of explaining to do.
