WSJ: Hillary Clinton’s Explanation for Controversial Bankruptcy Vote? Joe Biden

Clinton defended her vote for a controversial bankruptcy bill reviled by the left on Thursday, and said she did so at the insistence of then-Sen. Joe Biden, who just happens to be considering challenging her for the Democratic presidential nomination.

She sat down with a trio of women and one of them, Jo Smith, 43, asked her about that vote, noting that Elizabeth Warren, now a senator from Massachusetts, opposed it.

The overhaul was promoted by the credit-card and banking industries and would have made it more difficult for people to get relief from debts through bankruptcy.

On Thursday, Mrs. Clinton said that the bill was pending when she arrived in the Senate in 2001 and wanted some changes to protect alimony and child support payments.

“So I negotiated those changes and then the people who had been handling the bill said, ‘Well if we take your changes you have to support it.’ That’s the way the Senate works,” Mrs. Clinton said. “And so I said ‘It’s really important to me that we don’t hurt women and children, so I will support it even though there are other things I don’t like in it.’”

She then pointedly added this: “And it was Vice President Biden who was the senator from Delaware and the Republican co-sponsor that I was talking with, so I said I’d support it even though I’d opposed it before.”

The bill failed, but a similar measure passed in 2005. Mrs. Clinton missed that vote, she said, because her husband had been hospitalized for a heart ailment. She said she would have voted no.

During a presidential-primary debate in 2008, Mrs. Clinton was asked if she regretted her 2001 yes vote. “Sure I do, but it never became law,” she said.