How Joe Biden Celebrated the Day of a Pro-Abortion Victory

“We just kept laughing and yelling and hugging each other because sometimes, there are happy endings.”

Democratic presidential hopeful former Vice President Joe Biden laughs during the sixth Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential campaign season co-hosted by PBS NewsHour and Politico at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, on Dec. 19, 2019.
Democratic presidential hopeful former Vice President Joe Biden laughs during the sixth Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential campaign season co-hosted by PBS NewsHour and Politico at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, on Dec. 19, 2019. (photo: Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)

Please allow me to bring you back to 1990. President George H. W. Bush nominated David Souter for a Supreme Court seat. But nobody knew where Souter was on many major issues. The man was a walking tabula rasa. Pro-lifers were nervous and pro-choicers were too.

The senator from Delaware considered fighting the nomination. Recall that Biden knew how to block a Supreme Court nomination. Recall the lies and calumnies he and Senator Ted Kennedy leveled at Justice Robert Bork just two years earlier. But, in this case, Biden was convinced by the liberal Republican senator from New Hampshire, Warren Rudman, that Souter was liberal on abortion. He offered no evidence but Biden was convinced to stand down. This was a tricky situation because Rudman also had to convince pro-lifers that Souter was on their side.

Just two years later, in 1992, Casey v. Planned Parenthood was decided by the court and Souter was the decisive vote in the 5-4 ruling that enshrined Roe v. Wade as the law of the land. Think of that. One judge would have made all the difference right then. One judge.

But it get so much worse. On that same day Rudman and Biden ran into each other at a train station in Wilmington, Delaware. In his book about being a senator, Rudman wrote about that day Casey v. Planned Parenthood was announced.

From Townhall:

“At first, I didn’t see Joe; then I spotted him waving at me from far down the platform,” Rudman later recorded in his memoirs, Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate. “Joe had agonized over his vote for [Supreme Court Justice David Souter], and I knew how thrilled he must be. We started running through the crowd toward each other, and when we met, we embraced, laughing and crying.” An ecstatic Biden wept tears of joy, telling Rudman over and over: “You were right about him [Souter]! … You were right!”

The two men were so jubilant, so giddy — practically dancing — that Rudman said onlookers thought they were crazy: “But we just kept laughing and yelling and hugging each other because sometimes, there are happy endings.”

Happy endings. The man wrote happy endings about abortion.

Biden and Rudman embraced, laughed, and cried. The rest of us just cry.

This is the man running for president.