Former President Joe Biden blasted his predecessor and successor in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump, in a speech at the National Bar Association’s Centennial Convention in Chicago on Thursday night.
Biden said he was “proud I’ve appointed judges doing their best to be independent, fair, and impartial, respecting the rule of law, upholding the Constitution. I wish I could say the same for the executive branch.”
The 82-year-old said Trump was “doing his best to dismantle the Constitution.”
Saying that he was “deadly earnest,” Biden lamented that Congress was “just sitting on the sidelines” and that the Supreme Court was enabling the president’s worst impulses.
“The rulings they made, my God,” said Biden.
The former president said, “There are moments …that forced us to confront hard truths about ourselves, our institutions, and democracy itself. We are, in my view, at such a moment in American history, reflected in every cruel executive outreach, every rollback of basic freedoms, every erosion of long-standing established precedent.”
“Watching immigrants who are in this country legally, torn from the arms of their family, dragged away in handcuffs, the only home they’ve ever known,” said Biden. “My friends, we need to face the hard truths of this administration.”
He argued the Trump administration’s goals have been to “erase all the gains” from his own time in the White House, and “to erase history rather than make it, to erase fairness, equality, to erase justice itself. And that’s not hyperbole, that’s a fact.”
“Look, folks, you can’t sugarcoat this. These are dark days, but you’re all here for the same reason. I left that prestigious law firm … to go to the defender’s office years ago, it’s because our future is literally on the line,” he added.
Biden accepted an award from the association following his 22-minute speech, in which he criticized the president without mentioning him by name.
The former president was awarded the association’s highest honor, named after its founder, C. Frances Stratford. The National Bar Association is the country’s oldest and largest national association of mostly African American attorneys, judges, law professors, and students.
Biden’s speech targeting the president came as a group of federal judges has asked U.S. political leaders to tone down their rhetoric and ease their attacks on members of the judicial system after a spike in intimidation and death threats.
The group Speak Up for Justice hosted a forum on Thursday where a number of judges spoke of their experiences of receiving hatred and harassment.
While Trump was not named, Esther Salas, a District Court judge in New Jersey, said attacks came from the “top down.”
“The fix check is so easy in some ways, right, because what we need is our political leaders from the top down to stop fanning these flames, to stop using irresponsible rhetoric, to stop referring to judges as corrupt and biased and monsters that hate America. We need our leaders to lead responsibly,” said Salas Thursday.
“Stop demonizing us, stop villainizing us, because what they’re doing when they do that irresponsible rhetoric is they are inviting people to do us harm… because our leaders are calling us idiots and deranged, and monsters,” she added.
.jpg?trim=0,0,0,0&width=1200&height=800&crop=1200:800 "Welcome to adult summer camp! Where alcohol is aplenty and participants can’t let go of childhood – UK Times")