The high point of Joe Biden’s first presidential bid arguably occurred more than a year before he announced for the 1988 Democratic nomination.
In March 1986, the Delaware senator played a leading role blocking Jeff Sessions from a federal district judgeship.
Sessions later would become a household name as a senator from Alabama and President Trump’s first attorney general. For Biden, the boost was more immediate — it turned him into a leading opposition figure against the administration of President Ronald Reagan. Biden, with his eye on the next presidential race, scored a rare, direct political hit on Reagan, after the president’s 49-state reelection romp in 1984.
Biden’s campaign against Sessions is often glossed over in biographical sketches of the 2020 Democratic front-runner. Even Biden’s 2007 memoir, Promises to Keep, fails to mention the episode. But the Sessions confirmation brouhaha takes on renewed relevance in light of Biden’s recent musings about working civilly in the 1970s Senate with some of the most notorious segregationists of earlier decades.
Biden and Sessions, in fact, went on to have a longtime genial, if not particularly friendly, relationship while serving on opposite ends of the Senate Judiciary Committee. That’s the same body that years before rejected Sessions’ nomination.
In early 2009, as Biden became vice president under President Barack Obama, Sessions said he and his former Judiciary Committee colleague joked about his failed nomination.
“Vice President Biden said, ‘Sessions, if I [had] let you be a judge, I wouldn’t have to put up with you now,’” Sessions said.
Jim Manley, formerly a top adviser to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the pair symbolized a Senate camaraderie of even the recent past.
“You didn’t go out of the way to personalize the debate,” Manley told the Washington Examiner.
That was a sharp shift from the raw feelings of spring 1986. Then, in a series of Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, critics, led by Kennedy, essentially branded Sessions a racist. Among other charges, one of the nominee’s former deputies accused him of making racially insensitive comments to staff members while serving as the United States attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, based in Mobile.
At one committee hearing, Biden sharply questioned Sessions over his attitudes toward blacks and about his 1985 prosecution of three African Americans who were eventually acquitted on voting-fraud charges.
“Sessions, at a minimum, was much too flippant with regard to matters relating to race. He joked about it. He made comments about it,” Biden said.
Sessions disclaimed any racial animus and vigorously defended himself.
“I am not the Jeff Sessions my detractors have tried to create,” he proclaimed at one hearing, his voice rising. “I am not a racist; I am not insensitive to blacks; I supported civil rights activities in my state. I have done my job with integrity, equality, and fairness for all.”
But the damage was done.
On June 5, 1986, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 10–8 against recommending the Sessions nomination to the Senate floor, with two Republican senators joining the Democrats in opposition. It then split 9–9 on a vote to send the nomination to the floor with no recommendation. The Reagan administration withdrew the nomination on July 31, 1986.
Sessions was Biden’s highest-profile political scalp, though he had used such tactics before. In 1983, he helped block a Reagan nominee to the Board for International Broadcasters, Tom Ellis, who was a longtime political adviser to Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C. Under questioning from Biden, Ellis acknowledged he belonged to an all-white country club and owned extensive holdings in apartheid South Africa.
Both episodes, but particularly the Sessions defeat, helped give Biden a national platform as he geared up for the presidential race. Yet, they were overshadowed fairly quickly by the blockbuster Senate Judiciary Committee hearings a year-and-a-half later for Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, which ended in a 42-58 defeat.
Biden chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee for the Bork hearings, but the fight against him was more of a tag-team effort, headed by Kennedy and other Senate liberals. The Bork hearings came immediately in the aftermath of the Delaware Democrat’s shattered presidential campaign. Biden dropped out in September 1987 amid charges of plagiarism and otherwise embellishing his record.
Biden’s earlier attacks on Sessions ultimately were not politically fatal for the Alabamian. Despite his ignominious ouster as President Trump’s attorney general in November 2018, after less than two years on the job, Sessions can otherwise boast of a healthy political career.
Sessions’ judicial nomination died a bit under the halfway mark of his 12-year run as U.S. attorney for Alabama, spanning both Reagan terms and the presidency of George H.W. Bush. After Bill Clinton became president, Sessions was briefly in private law practice before winning his first elected office in 1994, as Alabama attorney general. When a rare Senate seat opened up in 1996, Sessions ran and won, holding it easily for the next 20 years before joining the Trump administration.
Sessions rarely talked about his failed confirmation hearings, said Steve Flowers, a leading Alabama political analyst.
“That hurt Sessions really deeply — more than you would have thought,” Flowers told the Washington Examiner. “He never talked about it. It’s almost like guys who were in the military who had a traumatic experience.”
Flowers, who served in the Alabama House of Representatives from 1982 to 1998 as a Democrat and has known all the state’s top politicos, said when the subject did come up, Sessions never spoke about Biden with particular animus.
“If he had resentment against Biden, it didn’t show,” Flowers said. “But he would almost grit his teeth when he got around Ted Kennedy.”
