On the morning of the inauguration, according to news and eyewitness reports, the streets near Georgetown University were blocked by a fleet of limousines and police on motorcycles. It was for Joe Biden, attending Mass on campus at Dahlgren Chapel. It was a sign that would now mark the presence of Joseph Biden, the risen Joe Biden, ascending to a post of high honorifics. Bereft of both knowledge and wisdom, he will nevertheless stand in the high councils of state, with an entourage of cars flashing lights to herald his progress.
The cars assembled at their post conveyed a message, as inescapable as it was portentous: Here, in a chapel, affecting to be in communion with his Church, is a man who has trumpeted his rejection of the most central moral teachings of the Church. During the presidential campaign he offered, as one of the prime accomplishments in his political life, that he helped to defeat the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. With that stroke he managed to preserve, unimpaired, the right to kill an unborn child at every stage of its life. We have had a sense of what it means to “give scandal” or to misinstruct the faithful about the teachings of their own Church. But now it is done even more dramatically, with the presence of limousines to convey the point: that you can be a prime defender of the right to abortion at every stage and for any reason – nay, you can even exult in public for your achievements in securing that “right” – and still be a “good Catholic.”
Twenty-one years ago, when Robert Bork was nominated to the Court, Joe Biden was the chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. In Bork, Biden was faced with a notable conservative who had been famously dismissive of natural law. For Bork and others, natural law simply furnished a set of airy slogans to which liberal judges appealed when they sought to evade the discipline of legal reasoning. Those antics gave natural law a bad name. Bork found a surer guide to judgment in the “positive” law – the law that was “posited” or enacted in statutes or in the text of the Constitution.
Faced then with a positivist among judges, Joe Biden opened the hearings on confirmation by staking out a strong position on natural law:
As a child of God, [he said] I believe my rights are not derived from the Constitution. My rights are not derived from any government. My rights are not derived from any majority. My rights are because I exist. They were given to me and each of my fellow citizens by our creator and they represent the essence of human dignity. [Emphasis added.]
But that summoning statement for the natural law should have struck in the most telling way against Biden’s stance on abortion. James Wilson, one of the premier minds among the American Founders, raised the question of when we acquire those rights that flow to us by nature. And the answer was: As soon as we began to be. By Biden’s own words, the doctrine of natural rights should protect the offspring in the womb as soon as we know it “exists.” He can evade the problem by affecting to be agnostic on the question of when human life begins. He could say, with Barack Obama, that the question is above his pay grade, if he simply neglects to consult the textbooks on embryology.
Clearly, he does not wish to leave that decision, on the beginning of human life, to the judgments confirmed by legislators. And so he must be willing to leave that judgment in the hands of the pregnant woman to decide for herself, on the basis of her own “perceptions,” woven with her self-interest. But would he have applied that standard to any other issue of natural rights? The question of slavery, as Lincoln said, was “whether a Negro is not or is a man.” Would Biden have left that answer in the hands of the owners of the slaves, whose interests would have been most directly affected by the judgment? Could it be, then, as Biden said, that we have rights that do not depend on the votes of majorities – but whether we exist at all is a question that may be left in the hands of people who have the most direct interest in denying our existence or our standing as human beings?
For Biden, incoherence lay on every path. Four years after the hearings on Robert Bork, Biden was faced with hearings over Clarence Thomas. The charge made against Thomas was that he had once done a lecture offering a pitch to take natural law seriously again. Biden then put out the warning, as earnestly as the warnings issued over Bork: that if we have a jurist who takes natural law seriously, there will be less regulation of the economy and more people dying then in industrial accidents. We may take these moments as snapshots of Joe Biden, to be placed in the album, as part of the chronicle of an American story: the rise, ever upward, of an empty man.
