More headlines: Joe Biden on Government Reform
(Following are older quotations. Click here for main quotations.)
1973: Senators deserve more than $42,000 salary
In the Senate, without challenging Jesse Helms's motives, he didn't hesitate to square off against him over the issue of a Senate pay raise.
Biden said he didn't disagree in terms of economic conditions that it might not be the best time, but he took issue with what he say as Helms's argument that the senators didn't deserve more than their 42K annual salary.
Biden himself pointedly had no stock investments, as most others did, and he empathized with colleagues who had to maintain two homes, one in their state and one in Washington, although he himself had no residence in the capital.
In floor debate, Biden argued," It seems to me that she would flat out tell the American people we are worth are salt."
Source: A Life of Trial & Redemption, by Jules Witcover, p.113-114
Oct 5, 2010
Would consider a Republican for head of DHS or Pentagon
Q: Would you go bipartisan if you were president? Would you appoint a Republican to run either the Department of Homeland Security or the Pentagon?A: The answer is I would consider that. The fact of the matter is the next president is going to have to
bring this country together. We are not blue and red. We cannot be sustained that way. We cannot get health care, we cannot get a foreign policy, we cannot do anything with a 51% solution. Every one of the things we’ve talked about here requires a
consensus, and if you don’t have the experience that I have and the success I’ve had reaching across the aisle, what makes you think you’re going to get a national health care plan? What makes you think you’re going to have an education plan?
What makes you think you’re going to have a rational foreign policy? The answer is, I would consider the most competent people I could, and I would try my best to reach across the aisle to reasonable people to unite this country. It needs to be united.
Source: 2007 AFL-CIO Democratic primary forum
Aug 8, 2007
Modern Congress is much cleaner than in 1970s or 1950s
Partisan legal harassment had become a major industry in Washington, providing crude entertainment and satisfying careers for thousands of short-sighted practitioners.
All this in a nation's capital was, by most accounts, for less corrupt than it had ever been. "Compare this Congress to the one in 1950, during the era that most of the old-timers consider the Golden Age of civil discourse," Senator Joseph Biden, a
Democrat from Delaware, said. "Those guys were taking handouts, honoraria, junkets. When I came here in 1973, Jacob Javits--a distinguished senator--was making money from a private law practice. You don't think he'd be under investigation today?
By comparison, these new guys are squeaky clean. I can't stand most of the SOBs--they're ideologues, they practice Khmer Rouge politics--but they are the cleanest bunch of politicians this capital has ever seen."
Source: The Natural, by Joe Klein, p. 88
Feb 11, 2003
Campaign reform in 1980s made more problems than it solved
By 1989, it was clear that the ethics was had reached a new level of intensity. Each side was using high-powered legal weapons to stalk the other. The weapons were of recent vintage--the product of the historic government reform effort that came after
the Watergate scandal. "We were going to reform the system," said Joseph Biden, referring to his generation's arrival in Congress. "But we created more problems than we solved. The campaign finance laws, the
Independent Counsel statute--nothing turned out the way it was supposed to."Biden might have added: the Ethics in Government Act of 1978; the reforms of the presidential-primary selection process and of the seniority system in
Congress; the limitations on presidential war and budgetary powers; the "whistle-blower" reforms that enabled disgruntled government employees everywhere to bring anonymous complaints against their bosses.
Source: The Natural, by Joe Klein, p. 93-94
Feb 11, 2003
Put a black woman on the Supreme Court
Everyone should be represented. No one's better than me and I'm no better than anyone else. The fact is, what we should be doing, about the Supreme Court:
I'm looking forward to making sure there's a black woman on the Supreme Court, to make sure we in fact get every representation. Not a joke; I pushed very hard for that.
Source: 10th Democratic Primary debate on eve of S.C. primary
Feb 25, 2020
1987: Rejected Bork on grounds of too-strong originalism
Biden chaired the Judiciary Committee during the contentious US Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork in 1987. Biden stated his opposition to Bork soon after the nomination, reversing an approval in an interview of a hypothetical Bork nomination he had
made the previous year and angering conservatives who thought he could not conduct the hearings dispassionately. At the close, Biden won praise for conducting the proceedings fairly and with good humor and courage, as his 1988 presidential campaign
collapsed in the middle of the hearings. Rejecting some of the less intellectually honest arguments that other Bork opponents were making, Biden framed his discussion around the belief that the US Constitution provides rights to liberty and privacy that
extend beyond those explicitly enumerated in the text, and that Bork's strong originalism was ideologically incompatible with that view. Bork's nomination was rejected in the committee by a 9- vote, and then rejected in the full Senate by a 58-2 margin.
Source: Wikipedia.org, "Joe Biden", re: Slouching Towards Gomorrah
Nov 17, 2009
Led fight against Bork based on ideology
Q: Can you think of a single policy issue, in which you were forced to change a long-held view in order to accommodate changed circumstances?BIDEN: Yes, I can. When I got to the US Senate and went on the Judiciary Committee as a young lawyer,
I had been trained in the view that the only thing that mattered was whether or not a nominee suggested by the president had a judicial temperament, and had not committed a crime of moral turpitude. It was hard to change, but it took about five years for
me to realize that the ideology of that judge makes a big difference. That’s why I led the fight against Judge Bork. Had he been on the court, I suspect there would be a lot of changes that I don’t like and the American people wouldn’t like, including
everything from Roe v. Wade to issues relating to civil liberties. I was the first chairman of the Judiciary Committee to forthrightly state that it matters what your judicial philosophy is. The American people have a right to know it.
Source: 2008 Vice Presidential debate against Gov. Sarah Palin
Oct 2, 2008
Roberts & Alito have turned Supreme Court upside down
The next president is likely to name at least one, if not three new Supreme Court justices. We should start this national debate by recognizing the truth. The truth is that Roberts and Alito have turned the court upside down.
The truth is that although I got criticized for being too tough on both of them, the Democratic Party wasn’t tough enough on both of them. And the truth is, as your president, I guarantee you that will change.
Source: 2007 NAACP Presidential Primary Forum
Jul 12, 2007
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