From Yesterday’s Man: The case against Joe Biden (Branko Marcetic, 2020) pp 85
The long-term triumph of the right-wing Reagan “revolution” lay not just in legislation and rhetoric but in the nation’s courts. For decades, conservatives had been grinding their teeth over the liberal direction of the Supreme Court, as its justices overturned long-standing local laws and “traditions,” appeared to invent new rights out of thin air, and seemed, in the eyes of conservatives, to generally be acting as a second legislative branch. Beginning in the 1970s, the Right walked the long road to take all this back.
As ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and later its chairman, Biden would preside over the start of the rightwing takeover of the federal courts that continues today. In some cases, his power to stop what was coming was limited, and he did the best he could; in others, he flat-out dropped the ball. In either case, Biden’s conciliatory approach stood in stark contrast to the combative, often uncompromising approach conservatives would take in the coming decades when placed in the same position. The result was that the Supreme Court, dominated by liberals since 1953, swung way to the right under Biden’s chairmanship, with 1960s-era civil rights protections perhaps the greatest casualty.
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