Our Better Angels
On January 20, after he is sworn in as our nation’s 46th president, Joseph Biden will deliver his inaugural address.
But 15 years ago, then-Senator Biden gave a speech at Suffolk that speaks powerfully, even prophetically, to the present moment. (See video highlights below.)
The date was May 22, 2005, and the occasion was the Suffolk University Law School Commencement. Biden, who was awarded an honorary degree, mounted an impassioned 30-minute defense of the U.S. Constitution—a document that he said was expressly “designed to prevent the accumulation and concentration of power in any one person or any one party.”
Just like 2021, 2005 found the country sharply split over many issues.
“We have become an increasingly divided nation,” Biden told his audience. “It’s red against blue, state against state, faith against faith, North against South, urban against rural, left against right. Our passions have driven us to the very edges of reason on critical issues that demand logic, cool heads, clear, rational thought, and—the dirty word today—the ability to compromise.”
Biden described a nation struggling to understand the facts and wondering who to believe amid “an ideological cacophony” of politicians and pundits. In the midst of such partisanship, he called on Suffolk Law’s 460 graduates to turn to the Constitution—to revere the balance of power it created, and to employ its tools to resolve differences.
“Our founders did not see fit to give the president unilateral powers,” said Biden, who taught constitutional law part-time from 1991 to 2008, while also serving in the Senate. Instead, they created a system of checks and balances that would “slow the mechanisms of governance down [and cool] the emotions of the time—and not be the product of a [single] political party’s discipline, whether left or right.”
Then, as now, Biden found reasons for optimism. He told graduates that he was buoyed by “a deep and abiding belief that they would seek and find the truth and protect the Constitution.
“I believe America is very much a Suffolk nation,” he told them. “It’s made up of people like you. People who are realistic, but no less committed. People with grit and attitude and a sense of community.”
“Many of you wanted to learn the law to make sure that power is never concentrated in the hands of the few,” he said. “And as lawyers, you are among the few who understand, and hopefully can explain, that if you take away one of the building blocks of our constitutional foundation—a single one that may be hard to explain and justify in the abstract—they all begin to fall.”
He charged the graduates to “leave our legal and constitutional system stronger for succeeding generations.” We have, he said, “an obligation to keep the door open for those who come behind us, and defend against those who would try to abuse power in anyway.”
