Via Talking Points Memo:
Vice President Joe Biden delivered a blistering critique of Donald Trump’s racially-tinged attacks on a federal judge, telling a confab of lawyers Thursday evening that Trump’s “conduct is literally undermining and threatening and potentially doing damage to an independent judiciary that the American people can have faith in.”
Biden delivered the remarks at a conference of the American Constitution Society, a progressive legal group. He also knocked Republicans for blocking consideration of President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland.
“It’s not the racism that frightens me, we’ve dealt with racists before. It’s the potential impact on the court,” Biden said. “And I might add a friendly note to my Republican friends, many of them longtime colleagues in the Senate, they assail Trump’s unacceptable and wrong censure of the judiciary, yet they refuse to confirm a judge of unquestionable credentials to the Supreme Court so that Mr. Trump can nominate, fill that vacancy.”
His speech stressed the importance of an independent judiciary branch and why he believed a Trump presidency would threaten it. Trump recently claimed that a federal judge presiding over lawsuits against one of his businesses was biased against him because of his Mexican heritage.