WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden knows a thing or two about contentious Supreme Court hearings, having presided over a pair of the most heated confirmations that still reverberate in U.S politics. That experience is shaping the process of naming the first Black female justice in a bitterly divided Washington.
Biden led the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1987 as Democrats blocked the confirmation of Ronald Reagan’s nominee, the late conservative judge and scholar Robert Bork. It was the last time lawmakers rejected a president’s nominee to the court.
In 1991, Biden presided over the hearing for George H.W. Bush’s nominee Clarence Thomas as he faced harrowing testimony of sexual harassment allegations from his former aide Anita Hill, a Black woman whose treatment by members of the committee Biden chaired remains a sore spot with female voters 30 years later.
