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Tony Mauro wants to remind people that Joe Biden has treated a few Supreme Court nominees a little shabbily.

He writes:

[Clarence Thomas] has less than fond memories of his treatment by Biden, who chaired his stormy 1991 hearing. In his 2007 memoir "My Grandfather's Son," Thomas recalls that Biden initially kept Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment against Thomas private. Before the firestorm began, Biden called him at home and said, "Judge, I know you don't believe me," but if the allegations come up, "I will be your biggest defender." Wrote Thomas, "He was right about one thing. I didn't believe him."

A bit more at the link. But it would be very easy to comb the old Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for loose talk that poured out of Joe Biden's mouth while an esteemed judge had to sit there and put up with it. I may go back and read the transcripts from the Reagan-Bush I era, but as for the the Roberts and Alito material, I've pre-blogged it, so let's see what I have.

There's this description, from Elisabeth Bumiller, of Biden at Day 2 of the Alito hearings:

"I understand, Judge, I am the only one standing between you and lunch, so I'll try to make this painless," he began, with some promise.

Mr. Biden then dived into a soliloquy on Judge Alito's failure to recuse himself from cases involving the Vanguard mutual fund company, which managed the judge's investments. After 2 minutes 50 seconds - short for the senator - Mr. Biden did appear to veer toward a question, but abandoned it to cite Judge Alito's membership in a conservative Princeton alumni group. Mr. Biden discoursed on that for a moment, then interrupted himself with an aside about his son who "ended up going to that other university, the University of Pennsylvania."

Judge Alito, who had been sitting without expression through Mr. Biden's musings, interrupted the senator midword, got out three sentences, then settled in for nearly 26 minutes more of Mr. Biden, with the senator doing most of the talking. With less than a minute to spare, Mr. Biden concluded, thanked Judge Alito for "being responsive," then said to Mr. Specter that "I want to note that for maybe the first time in history, Biden is 40 seconds under his time."

To which I said:

How appalling! And complimenting himself, in the third person, in the end, as if he's being charmingly self-deprecating?

There's this from Day 3 of the Roberts hearings:

Joe Biden is hamming it up big time, dramatizing the frustration of not getting Roberts to say how he'll decide specific cases. We've been through this so many times, but Biden seems to think that, if he just emotes more than the others, the American public will finally see the outrage of a judge not committing his vote before hearing the case. Yet every time Roberts explains why he won't answer, he sounds so eloquent and even inspiring about the role of the judge, that it ends up making the Senator look childish.

None of this Roberts-Alito material is anywhere near as awful as what happened to Thomas (and Robert Bork). Biden was just talking too much, in love with the sound of his own voice, and frankly, that let the nominees off the hook.

Full post as published by Althouse on September 07, 2008 (boomark / email).