Status Quo Joe's Opposition To Roe v Wade And To Brown v Board Of Education

God forbid

Yesterday, we took a look at the potential of Democratic primary voters making the fatal error of nominating an anti-Choice corporate conservative to go up against Trump. Wetalked mostly about Biden's decades-long support for the hideously discriminatory Hyde Amendment. Ryan Grim, over at The Intercept dug into another aspect of Biden's anti-Choice posture-- his more recent determination to undermine Obamacare's coverage of contraception. "As vice president," wrote Grim, "Joe Biden repeatedly sought to undermine the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, working in alliance with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to push for a broad exemption that would have left millions of women without coverage. Biden’s battle over contraception is a window into his approach to the politics of reproductive freedom, a function of an electoral worldview that centers working-class Catholic men over the interests of women. The issue has been causing his presidential campaign some discomfort-- on Wednesday, Biden’s campaign clarified that he remains a supporter of the so-called Hyde Amendment, a provision that bars federal money from being used to fund reproductive health services. Biden had recently told an activist with the American Civil Liberties Union that he opposed the amendment, and wanted to see it repealed."

Grim doesn't discuss the marked propensity of Biden to lie as though he still lives in the 1950s, when lies were not as easily fact-checked and exposed as they are today. And while Biden doesn't lie as much as Trump, PolitiFact finds he and Trump are in another world of deceitful assholes and gaslighters compared to any of the other Democratic candidates.

On contraception, according to contemporaneous reporting and sources involved with the internal debate, Biden had argued that if the regulations implementing the Affordable Care Act were going to mandate coverage, it would have angered white, male, Catholic voters, and threatened Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012. Biden’s main ally in the internal fight over contraception was chief of staff William Daly; both men are Catholic.

Opposing Biden was a faction of mostly women advisers, joined by some men, who argued that Biden had both the policy and the politics wrong. On policy, they noted that if his broad exemption went into effect, upwards of 6 million women who happened to be employed by religious-affiliated organizations would lose contraception coverage. The politics were just as bad, they argued, given that women were increasingly becoming central to the party’s success. To turn on them on the issue of access to birth control-- embracing a fringe position not even adopted by most Catholics who aren’t bishops-- would put that support at risk.

Biden has long said that he is personally opposed to abortion, but supports the legal right. His support of Roe v. Wade has not always been full-throated.

“When it comes to issues like abortion, amnesty, and acid, I’m about as liberal as your grandmother,” Biden said in a June 1974 article. “I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.”

Because Biden’s anti-Roe comments came so long ago-- more than four decades-- some have argued they are of little value in gauging his current politics. But his battle against contraception, and his unwillingness to join the bulk of the Democratic field and call for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, puts him dramatically out of step with today’s party.

Biden is so out of step, in fact, that when he was shown polling data during the contraception fight, he dismissed it as inaccurate. He has a view of the American electorate’s politics on abortion that can’t be influenced by new facts. Jake Tapper, then reporting for ABC News, reported in February 2012:

The two sides couldn’t even agree about what they were debating. In the fall, [Planned Parenthood head Cecile] Richards brought in polling indicating that the American people overwhelmingly supported the birth control benefit in health insurance. She also highlighted statistics showing the overwhelming use of birth control.



The Vice President and others argued that this wouldn’t be seen as an issue of contraception-- it would be seen as an issue of religious liberty. They questioned the polling of the rule advocates, arguing that it didn’t explain the issue in full, it ignored the question of what religious groups should have to pay for. And they argued that women voters for whom this was an important issue weren’t likely to vote for Mitt Romney, who has drawn a strong anti-abortion line as a presidential candidate, saying he would end federal funding to Planned Parenthood and supporting a “personhood” amendment that defines life as beginning at the moment of fertilization.

...In his vice presidential debate with Mitt Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, Biden attempted to portray it as a broad exemption. “No religious institution-- Catholic or otherwise, including Catholic social services, Georgetown hospital, Mercy hospital, any hospital-- none has to either refer contraception, none has to pay for contraception, none has to be a vehicle to get contraception in any insurance policy they provide. That is a fact,” Biden said in the debate.

In a rare public disagreement with Biden, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops shot back with a statement, accurately saying that Biden’s claim was “not a fact.” Indeed, many religious-affiliated entities that had hoped to win an exemption, and which had Biden’s support inside the White House, had failed. But with Biden now a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for president, they may get another shot at denying access to contraception to their employees.

A dead giveaway to when Biden is trying to deceive his audience is when he says "That is a fact." That usually how he gives away the actual fact-- that he's lying. As PolitiFact discovered over the years, Biden lies far more than even most politicians (other than Trump, of course. But Trump is too low a bar for people who expect a public official to be basically truthful and ethical.

Another topic Biden tries to avoid these days-- but which Trump will not allow him to if he wins the nomination-- is his racism, the issue in the 1970s that first turned me against an upcoming right-wing Democratic politician-- and piece of shit-- from Delaware. I've watched Biden since the early '70s and never had a moments doubt that he is and has always been a vile, repulsive racist. Obama, for his own reasons, did a lot to lift that onus from Biden and many Democrats who pine for another Obama term mistakenly think Biden is another Obama. He certainly isn't. Yesterday, The Nation published an important piece by Jonathan Kozol, Joe Biden Once Made Common Cause With School Segregationists. We've talked about how Biden got his political start-- as a fighter against racial integration-- but let's look at how Kozol framed the issue, important because today Biden's top demographic support is coming from African-American women who didn't go to college and are over the age of 60.

Advocates for children and civil rights who have not yet given up entirely on the struggle to break down the walls of racial isolation in our public schools may want to take a good hard look at Joe Biden’s shameful record on school segregation. Despite his recent effort to allay concerns about that record, it cannot be expunged, nor easily forgiven.

In an education-policy proposal released by his campaign on May 28, Biden briefly spoke of encouraging diversity by giving grants and guidance to districts that are willing to pursue it. But he said nothing to disown his lengthy history as a fierce opponent of school busing and a scathing critic of the Warren Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

“We’ve lost our bearings since the 1954 Brown v. School Board desegregation case,” Biden said in 1975, in an interview that he gave to a newspaper in Delaware that was recently unearthed by the Washington Post. “To ‘desegregate’ is different than to ‘integrate.’”

In the interview, which captured an early unfiltered Biden, today’s Democratic front-runner picked through a grab bag of anti-integration canards to make his case against busing-- among them, the idea that a school where children of different races or multiple ethnicities sit in class together is doomed to be inferior. “The real problem with busing,” Biden said, “is that you take [white] people who aren’t racist, people who are good citizens, who believe in equal education and opportunity, and you stunt their children’s growth by busing them to an inferior school.” For Biden, it seems, the “stunting” of black children’s growth in the savagely unequal and deliberately segregated public schools I’ve been describing for years did not elicit the same sense of alarm.

Nor did Biden stop there. With bald disregard for centuries of American history, he said, “I do not buy the concept, popular in the ‘60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and…in order to even the score, we must now give the black man”-- no reference to black women-- ”a head start or even hold the white man back.… I don’t buy that.”

He concluded, “I oppose busing. It’s an asinine concept, the utility of which has never been proven to me. I’ve gotten to the point where I think our only recourse to eliminate busing may be a constitutional amendment.”

Crucially, Biden didn’t just talk the anti-busing talk. He also took a leading role in fighting what he called “unnecessary busing” by pushing bills that would have forced the federal government to consider “other” ways of equalizing education-- ways that would not have required what old-fashioned bigots used to call race-mixing. In a series of letters, recently released by CNN, that Biden wrote to Dixiecrat Senator James Eastland in 1977, he expressed his thanks to Eastland for supporting anti-busing legislation he had introduced.

“I want you to know that I very much appreciate your help…in attempting to bring my anti-busing legislation to a vote,” he wrote the Mississippi Democrat, a virulent opponent of civil rights who frequently referred to black people as “an inferior race.”

Biden, moreover, did not simply reinforce the efforts of Southern segregationists. He also took a decisive role in fueling opposition to desegregation efforts in the Northern states and providing Northern liberals with a convenient rationale for joining him in these attempts. In a stunning piece of reportage in Politico in 2015, historian Jason Sokol surfaced Biden’s argument that busing children for the sake of integration was an insult to black people because, he said, it implies that they “have no reason to be proud of…their own culture” and cannot learn unless they’re sitting next to a white child. By dragging out this old and wrinkled chestnut, Biden sought to turn the tables on Senate integrationists.

Biden also argued that de facto segregation in the Northern cities, unlike de jure segregation in the South, could not be held to justify court-ordered busing programs, because there was no evidence that it was the consequence of governmental practices. In depicting Northern segregation as a matter of mere demographic happenstance and denying that it was occasioned by political intention, “Biden’s logic,” according to Sokol, “allowed the political center-left to coalesce around [his] brand of opposition” to school busing.

Senator Ed Brooke, a liberal Republican who served two Senate terms representing Massachusetts and was the sole black member of the Senate at the time, was outraged by Biden’s stance. “Perhaps,” says Sokol, “Brooke foresaw the new political consensus that would take shape in the ensuing decades: Liberals would pay homage to the civil rights movement and its dream of integration, but refrain from championing the legislation that would make the dream a reality.”

Biden has made no apologies for his willingness to rip apart the final remnants of the legacy of Brown at a seminal moment in our nation’s history. As The Washington Post candidly surmised, Biden’s “decision to stand by his views on the issue illustrates what some of his supporters think would be his advantage in the 2020 field: his ability to appeal beyond his Democratic base to some white working-class voters who voted for Donald Trump in 2016.” This may seem “smart strategy” to some. But it reeks of cynical contempt for social-justice values, even if his strategists attempt to dress it up as nothing more than shrewd consensus-building.

Like other careful centrists, Biden threads the needle on the subject of diversity by saying that he favors it in principle, even in the face of his decades-long resistance to letting children climb onto a bus in order to achieve it. This is simply doublespeak. In a nation in which residential segregation and unabated patterns of red-lining have guaranteed the seemingly eternal sequestration of black and Hispanic children in poorly funded schools within their own communities, Biden’s many years of strident opposition to letting children ride the good old yellow bus represent a throwback to the age of Plessy v. Ferguson.

All over America, every morning, we see the blinking lights of the yellow bus that’s picking up school children. At 2 or 3 pm, we see the lights again as the bus returns the children to their neighborhood, the departing kids waving to their friends. Some of those buses, unbeknownst to Biden apparently, are bringing children of color out of virtual-apartheid schooling districts into richly funded schools in affluent communities.

My longtime friend and co-worker in civil rights in Boston, Julia Walker, 86, whose kids and grandkids rode the bus from inner-city Boston to well-funded suburban schools, thanks to an inter-district integration program that she helped to fight for starting more than 50 years ago, looked at Biden’s language and made the observation that activists for civil rights have made for many decades: “It’s not the bus. It’s the color of the children that it’s bringing to your neighborhood.”

The program Walker and other activists and leaders in Boston’s black community struggled to make possible, known as METCO, is the longest-running program of its kind in the nation. It serves more than 3,000 children who ride the bus to more than 30 suburbs and have a graduation rate of approximately 95 percent. It’s always had its critics among those who share Joe Biden’s views, but not among the thousands of black families whose kids have been on waiting lists to get into the program, and not among the many teachers like myself (I taught in the program for two years) who have seen its students go on to higher education and then into professional careers or leadership positions in the business world.

Several of the children whom I came to know in the first years of the program later became teachers, and frequently the first black teachers, in the same school districts they’d attended or other districts in the Boston area, and helped to build the structures of multicultural support that are essential features of good integration programs. An enlightened nation would not turn its back on this kind of program but would see it, for all its imperfections, as a realistic model for a more extensive metro-wide desegregation effort in which no kids of color are left to sit on waiting lists until their childhood is over and their parents’ dreams of equal education have been lost forever.

Bitterly enough, the tide seems to be heading in the opposite direction. Political elites in Massachusetts, instead of working to expand the program, have frozen it for several decades at its present level, while many programs like it elsewhere in the nation have been phased out altogether. A president who champions school desegregation, with no reservations about the only present way in which to make it possible, could reignite the sense of ethical imperative that inspired programs such as METCO more than half a century ago. Biden is not likely to be that kind of president.

Unlike Bernie Sanders, who recently proposed a “Thurgood Marshall Plan” for public education that calls for a renewal and expansion of desegregation plans by means of transportation, Biden still believes his original position was correct and, according to one of his aides, Bill Russo, sees no reason to revise it. No matter how he tries to blur the edges of his past or present-day beliefs, no matter how he waffles in his language in order to present himself as some kind of born-again progressive, Biden has not shown that he can be trusted to confront our nation’s racist past and one of its most urgent present needs.

As the mainstream media repeatedly remind us, Biden is a likable man in many ways: even his critics often speak about his graciousness. But Biden’s likability will not help Julia Walker’s grandkids and her “great-grands” and the children of her neighbors to go to schools where they can get an equal shot at a first-rate education and where their young white classmates have a chance to get to know and value them, and learn from them, as children do in ordinary ways, when we take away the structures that divide them.

Biden will probably always be the lesser of two evils when it comes to Trump. But Democratic primary voters who want to see Trump defeated would be fools to gamble on someone like Biden who will be such an easy target for Republicans and Russians when it comes to holding down Democratic base turnout.