The Old Senate Is Hardwired Into Joe Biden
Updated at 2:13 p.m. ET on June 21, 2019
When Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. arrived in the Senate from Delaware in 1973, one of the first colleagues he tangled with was James Oliver Eastland of Mississippi, the vicious segregationist who ruled the Judiciary Committee with unyielding resolve, and who’d first been elected a couple of weeks before Biden was born. After Biden spoke up forcefully in a Democratic caucus meeting on behalf of total public financing of political campaigns, Eastland pounced.
“They tell me you’re the youngest man in the history of America ever elected to the U.S. Senate,” Eastland said, as Biden recalled in his 2007 memoir, Promises to Keep. (Biden was actually the second youngest, but thought it best not to correct Eastland.) “Y’all keep making speeches like you made today,” Eastland added, “and you gonna be the youngest one-term senator in the history of America.”
It’s no surprise that Biden’s invocation this week of Eastland and his Jim Crow colleague Herman Talmadge of Georgia as exemplars of a vanished brand of genteel bipartisanship in Washington
