Biden's mastery of backlash politics takes center stage

[bluewater]

Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware didn't need to hear any more from the legion of critics lined up against his bill limiting federal courts' power to desegregate schools by busing students.

It was July 1977, there wasn't much time before such an order was to take effect in Wilmington — the largest city in Biden's home state — and he was eager to move the bill he had written with Delaware's senior senator, Republican William Roth, through the Judiciary Committee and to the Senate floor.

One of his aides, Gerry Doherty, had just told Ken Dixon, a staff member for liberal Sen. Birch Bayh, D-Ind., that the panel wouldn't hold more hearings to gather testimony from civil rights and labor groups opposed to the legislation when Biden walked up to the pair, according to a memo Dixon wrote at the time.

"You can put as many people in the hearing record as you want," Biden said, according to the memo, which has been preserved in the Birch Bayh Senatorial Papers section of the Modern Political Papers collection at Indiana University. "But you know it and I know it that if I don't get a bill out by September it won't do me any good."

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/biden-s-mastery-backlash-politics-takes-center-stage-n1025931

[Blue_true]

1. Wow. It was about political advantage and not about what was right. nt