The start of the confirmation hearings to put Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court was nowhere to be found on The New York Times' front page. Joe Biden couldn't have been more thrilled.
"My heart sang," said Biden, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He declared the muted media coverage _ an indication of the dearth of controversy surrounding the liberal jurist _ was the "most wonderful thing that had happened" since he became head of the powerful panel.
He was right to predict smooth sailing; Ginsburg ultimately won the approval of 96 senators, and Biden, in helping shepherd her confirmation, had made yet another imprint on the nation's courts.
The 1993 ascent of the second woman to the Supreme Court was hardly the only impact Biden made on the courts, though not all came so smoothly. As his tongue-in-cheek remark implied, his work on confirming judges was marked just as much by rancorous controversy as bipartisan comity.
His decadeslong tenure on the Senate Judiciary Committee yielded some of the most significant liberal victories of his career and missteps that continue to dog him as the Democratic presidenti
