President Trump was extremely successful in having placed 234 Article III Judges, including 3 Supreme Court Justices. His record of working with the Senate to confirm outstanding Judicial nominees stands in strong contrast to the record of then Senators Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Biden was one of 22 senators who voted against [Chief Justice John] Roberts [who will swear him in tomorrow] in 2005. . . .
Roberts is far from the only justice whose confirmation Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris opposed. Biden, who was a senator from Delaware for more than 35 years, also voted not to confirm Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Harris, a California senator, cast votes against the nominations of the three Trump appointees to the high court: Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
It’s the first time in American history that the incoming president and vice president have together voted against a majority of the court.
How bad were they? As we wrote back in May of last year, we should never forget it was Joe Biden who started the Judicial Confirmation madness. More recently Ilya Shapiro wrote (emphasis added).
Although Biden presents himself as a centrist unifier, on judicial nominations, he’s been a partisan brawler. During a 36-year Senate career, the only Republican Supreme Court nominees he voted for were confirmed unanimously or nearly so. And that goes doubly for Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, who smeared Brett Kavanaugh with baseless innuendo and voted against more than 80% of Trump’s judicial nominees.
Biden became Judiciary Committee chairman when the Democrats won back that chamber in the 1986 midterm elections, just in time to preside over the Robert Bork hearings. While Ted Kennedy led the anti-Bork demagoguery, Biden’s sustained attacks were crucial to derailing the nomination. Four years later, Biden bizarrely went after Clarence Thomas for being too zealous in protecting individual rights. After Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment surfaced, Biden reopened the hearings and led what Thomas characterized as a “high-tech lynching.” In April 2019, as he geared up for his presidential run, Biden called Hill to express “regret for what she endured.” No apology to Justice Thomas has been forthcoming.
In June 1992, having failed to stop the Thomas confirmation and fearing further Republican appointments, Biden went to the Senate floor to urge President George H.W. Bush not to nominate anyone if a Supreme Court vacancy arose before that fall’s election. That speech would resurface 24 years later, when President Barack Obama made a nomination in the final year of his second term, leading to debate over the “Biden rule.”
One of President Trump’s greatest accomplishments was his remaking of the Judiciary despite the extreme obstacles facing his nominees, such as those faced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in the Senate. Senator Biden was the leader of the effort to break the Senate judicial confirmation process. It would be karmic justice if Biden’s judicial nominees struggle to get confirmed in the Senate.