Joe Biden’s descent into racial quicksand continues apace.
We have new hints as to why Biden got along so famously with segregationist Dixiecrats, like Sen. James Eastland of Mississippi, thanks to reporting by the Washington Free Beacon’s Brent Scher. For one thing, they saw eye-to-eye on the issue of opposing the busing of students for the purpose of racial desegregation.
Biden opposed the policy so much, in fact, that he was incensed when fellow Democrat Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota moved to block a bill that would have prohibited a federal court from ordering Delaware to desegregate via busing.
Abourezk’s 1989 memoir, Advise & Dissent: Memoirs of South Dakota and the U.S. Senate, recalls that NAACP lobbyists approached him in 1977 to block the anti-busing bill written by Biden and Republican Sen. William Roth of Delaware.
“Clarence Mitchell of the NAACP approached me to ask if I would lead the fight against the bill in the Judiciary Committee,” Abourezk writes. “If I could hold up passage of the bill until the court’s ruling went into effect, the legislation would be nullified.”
NAACP lobbyists found a receptive audience in the South Dakota senator, who went on to make sure Biden’s anti-busing bill did not see the light of day. This did not sit well with Delaware’s Democratic senator. At all. Biden called him a “son of a bitch,” a “dirty bastard,” and vowed never again to vote for one of Abourezk’s bills, the former South Dakota senator writes.
The Senate Judiciary Conference was chaired at the time by Eastland – the same the segregationist that Biden name-dropped recently as he boasted of being able to forge cordial working relationships with anyone in the U.S. Senate. Eastland opened the conference by calling up Biden’s anti-busing bill, and then promptly adjourned the meeting after it became clear Abourezk aimed to filibuster it, Scher notes.
The former senator writes: “Eastland recognized me and I told the committee members to make themselves comfortable, because I intended to speak at length.”
After the meeting was adjourned, Abourezk claims he got an earful from Biden:
“Calm down, Joe,” I told him, “You’re eventually gonna thank me for doing this.”
“Like hell I will you dirty bastard.” Biden snorted, stomping out of the room.
Eastland kept calling up the anti-busing bill, which the Mississippi senator “rather liked,” and Abourezk kept blocking it, prompting Biden to grow “even angrier” day by day, the former South Dakota senator recalls.
But then something changed, which allegedly shifted Biden’s attitude favorably toward his more liberal colleague.
“A few days later, Biden came into the scheduled committee meeting, this time with a broad, friendly grin aimed directly at me,” the memoir reads. “‘Jesus, Abourezk, you were right,’ he said. ‘I am gonna thank you. You should see the Delaware newspapers — big front-page headlines saying, ‘Biden Battles Liberals in Washington.’ He was unabashedly elated. ‘They love me back home, how did you know this would happen?’”
There is something to be said for the merits of efforts to desegregate by busing. There is something to be said for efforts to oppose those efforts. But none of that will matter in the Democratic 2020 primary. The party has embraced a context- and nuance-free ideal of racism, and Biden is a friendly fire casualty.
