Joe Biden desperately dodging key election question ‘haunting’ nominee's campaign
JOE BIDEN has been avoiding answering one particular question in the run-up to the US election which could seriously impact his campaign, according to political commentators.
Joe Biden’s Supreme Court policy discussed by experts 1769459125HzNKkA8Q
Mr Biden, the Democratic nominee, is currently leading in the polls to win the presidential election set to take place next week. His opponent, the incumbent President Donald Trump, is trailing heavily. However, he overturned a huge poll deficit in 2016 to claim the White House from Hillary Clinton’s grasp, meaning the Democrats are not willing to leave anything to chance.
Mr Trump also just secured a victory when his nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, was confirmed as the latest addition to the Supreme Court to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
She is Mr Trump’s third successful justice nomination for the panel of the Supreme Court judges.
He recently hailed her confirmation as a “momentous day” for the “fair and impartial rule of law” in the US.
The Supreme Court is an area of contention for Mr Biden’s campaign partly because it now has six conservative judges and only three liberals due to Mr Trump’s time in office.
The Democratic nominee has desperately avoided answering questions on “court-packing” during his campaign, which is a term for changing the number, format or the make-up of the Supreme Court.
Speaking on the BBC’s Americast earlier this month, commentator Emily Maitlis noted: “Biden has tried to dodge this every step of the way because he knows it’s controversial.”
If he wins, many expect him to alter the Supreme Court in order to suit the Democrats’ needs and so the conservatives no longer outnumber the liberals.
Yet, Mr Biden has refused to say whether he would implement such change — instead, he has called “court-packing” a “distraction” during a presidential debate with Mr Trump.
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Speaking on the podcast, Ms Maitlis explained: “What [Biden] does say at the end of that, really crucially, is that he will let the American people know by election day where he stands on that.
“That’s going to be quite a moment for the Democrats to decide which side they’re coming down on.”
Anthony Zurcher, the BBC’s senior Northern America reporter, explained: “You can see strategy here from Joe Biden — he’s trying to be intentionally vague, and the reason he’s doing that is because he doesn’t want to anger conservatives, who are finally getting that solid, conservative Supreme Court that they’ve been longing for for decades.
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“And they’re going to vote if they feel Joe Biden is going to come in and threaten that.
“On the other side, he doesn’t want to anger liberals, progressives, because they think that they need to be aggressive in countering what they see as Republican hypocrisy.
“They see two stolen Supreme Court seats [and] they want a confrontational Joe Biden, not a conciliatory one.”
He is currently straddling both sides of the fence, despite the Democrat’s whole campaign being built on a more “straight-talking” approach.
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The BBC's North America editor John Sopel said Mr Biden looked “shifty” by not answering it clearly.
He said: “This is a weakness that Biden could have cleared up and should have cleared up earlier, but they’re trying to let this question dangle for as long as they possibly can.”
Ms Maitlis spoke up in agreement and said, unless addressed, “all the media [will] kind of laser in one question and it will carry on being that dominant question for the Democrats”.
