Echoing some recent Republican arguments about judicial nominations, Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday suggested that President Barack Obama will not nominate a staunch liberal to replace Justice Antonin Scalia at a time when the ideological balance of the Supreme Court is up in the air.

In the wide-ranging interview that often turned provocative, especially when he complained about the Democratic presidential race he decided to skip, the vice president flatly said an Obama nominee in the outspoken progressive mold of former Justice William Brennan is “not going to happen.” Biden, who fiercely defended legislative prerogatives as the longtime chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also volunteered that “it was never intended for the president to pick whoever he wants and that’s it.” And he suggested the Senate has the right to consider not only a nominee’s philosophy, but how much the nomination would change the court, a common GOP talking point these days.


“This is a potentially gigantic game-changer,” Biden told a POLITICO reporter and a Washington Post reporter during a sitdown on Air Force Two. “My advice is the only way we get someone on the Court now or even later is to do what was done in the past.”

Biden mentioned two examples of Republican nominees who were confirmed in times of flux because they weren’t overtly ideological conservatives — current swing Justice Anthony Kennedy, “who wasn’t a conservative’s conservative,” and former Justice David Souter, who often ended up voting with the Court’s liberal wing. He said Obama also intends to nominate “someone who has demonstrated they have an open mind, someone who doesn’t have a specific agenda,” even though Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he shouldn’t bother nominating anyone in his last year.

Biden said he hasn’t met with Obama to discuss the nomination yet, and he refused to discuss specific candidates like D.C. Circuit Judge Sri Srinivasan, who was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in 2013. But he said there are plenty of available candidates without reputations as liberal advocates.

“There are a whole hell of a lot of people who Republicans have already voted for who fall into that category, and also people they haven’t voted for yet,” said Biden, who noted that he has presided over more judicial nominations than anyone in history other than the late Sen. James Eastland of Mississippi.

Biden covered a variety of other topics in the 40-minute interview. He said he would support reinstating or at least updating the Glass-Steagall barrier between commercial banks and investment banks. He compared the extremism of the 2016 Republican Party to the “left-left” Democratic Party that got wiped out behind George McGovern in 1972. He mocked Sen. Marco Rubio’s “Morning in America” ad featuring the Vancouver skyline — “When it goes bad, it goes bad” — and expressed skepticism about Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz as viable general-election candidates. He said Rubio could be viable, “but he’s missed it so far.” He noted that Trump hasn’t exceeded 38 percent in a primary yet, but acknowledged that he’s struck an angry populist chord, “perfectly fit for the time in his party.”

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” Biden quipped.

The vice president spoke most extensively and passionately about the Democratic race between Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders, questioning why both candidates sound so gloomy about the Obama economy. He spent the previous two days on a public-relations tour celebrating the seventh anniversary of the Obama stimulus bill that helped end the Great Recession, and with his usual flair for hyperbole, he expressed disappointment on Thursday that the Democrats haven’t focused more on the progress the U.S. has made in reducing unemployment, cutting deficits and reshaping the economy since those dark days.

“Look, this is totally, thoroughly objective: We are so much better positioned than anyone else in the world, for Christ’s sake,” Biden said. “It’s not even close!”

Biden agreed with the premise that the middle class is still hurting, but he said that it’s a big mistake for Democrats to accept the GOP notion that the country is in shambles, even though most Americans currently say the nation is on the wrong track. He argued that Democratic congressional candidates have done best when they have embraced the administration’s record, that today's Democrats can’t just run on “billionaires and gay rights.” He urged them to make a case for record of the past eight years, and against the Republican plans to undo the past eight years if they win sole control of Washington.

“My generic point is, you get behind the curve,” Biden said. “Even my own folks say, ‘Jeez, Joe, 60-70 percent of the American people think we’re going in the wrong direction. Don’t try to buck it.’ What do you mean, don’t try to buck it? If everybody doesn’t buck it, guess what, it’s gospel. We must be in deep trouble. We must have really screwed the pooch.”

Clinton and Sanders have both sung the praises of Obama while dispensing gloom about stagnant wages and a rigged political system, but Biden said he wishes they would spend more time “pushing back on the story line that what we did to get us to this point was a failure and a mistake.” When asked why he thinks they sound so gloomy, he acknowledged that his was a minority view among pundits, and noted, without much apparent conviction, that Clinton and Sanders are both surrounded by “a lot of smart people who are probably politically smarter than me.”

“They must say there’s no way to sell a positive message,” he said.

Biden did say, without much enthusiasm, that he could support either Clinton or Sanders, and he probably revealed some lingering tensions with Clinton when he went to great lengths to defend Sanders against the notion that he’s another out-of-the-mainstream McGovern. Biden said that on many key issues, Clinton and her socialist rival are “basically on the same page, with different emphasis,” and that the Sanders focus on vast inequality and campaign-finance corruption resonates with nonleftists.

“Look, what Bernie is talking about now is mainstream,” Biden said. “The mainstream is saying ‘wait a minute, the concentration of wealth is a disaster.’ Full-blown capitalists are saying, that’s true, that’s not right. I haven’t heard him lay out in detail what the socialist part of his agenda is.“ When asked whether a single-payer health care system counted, Biden again came to Sanders’ defense. “That was the president’s position, initially,” he said. “That was Hillary’s position!”

Biden was clearly enjoying himself in his role as elder statesman, even if he did seem a bit wistful about missing out on what could have been his last campaign. He said he has no regrets about skipping the race, but he vowed to continue to make his views known.

“Hopefully, it will impact the nature of the debate within the Democratic Party,” he said. “It’s not about either one of the candidates; I can live with either one of them. I can support either one of them. I just have a different sense of how we should be talking about the issues that face us, to enhance the possibility that we keep the White House, so we don’t have everything we fought for undone."

