As the details of just how cognitively impaired Joe Biden was during his presidency begin to emerge, and the extent to which national affairs were directed by persons other than Biden becomes apparent, a fitting denouement for Biden’s long political career is taking shape. Each time Biden sought his party’s presidential nomination, he displayed more willingness to surrender his autonomy to whatever zeitgeist du jour had taken hold of the Democratic Party.

Biden’s humiliating presidency was just the final degradation in the Faustian bargain he struck when he first ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1987. After 15 years as a pro-life senator, realizing that abandoning the innocent unborn was a prerequisite to being nominated, Biden did an about-face on abortion. Many Democratic politicians would follow suit. A handful did not, the most prominent of whom died without regret 25 years ago this spring.

Like Biden, Governor Robert Casey of Pennsylvania was an Irish Catholic son of Scranton. Alongside many Scrantonians of his generation, he was the son and grandson of coal miners. Growing up in that Depression-era milieu gave Casey an instinctive allegiance to the poor, marginalized, and defenseless. Casey’s autobiography, Fighting for Life (1996), makes it clear that he saw parallels between the miner toiling in the dark at the mercy of external, unseen forces and the unborn child in the womb. It was this innate outrage at the injustices meted out upon the weak by the strong that made Casey the champion of America’s most vulnerable minority.

After attending the College of the Holy Cross on a basketball scholarship, Casey’s passion for justice led him to the practice of law and then into politics. Ever the underdog, in his fourth run for the Pennsylvania governorship in 1986, the man derided as “The Three-Time Loss from Holy Cross” defeated a pro-choice Republican in a major upset. Four years later, Casey trounced another pro-choice Republican by a popular vote margin of two to one, carrying 66 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties.

In 1989, Casey signed into law amendments to Pennsylvania’s Abortion Control Act containing a panoply of restrictions on abortion including informed consent, a 24-hour waiting period, parental notification, and spousal notification. Defending the law all of the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where all but the spousal notification provision was upheld in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), Casey stood on the Court steps and asked, “In this debate, who speaks for the child?” and answered, “Today I’ve come here to say that Pennsylvania speaks for the child.”

Barred by his own party from repeating that message at the 1992 Democratic Convention, Casey decided to challenge incumbent President Bill Clinton for the 1996 Democratic presidential nomination. It would have been a campaign of rare philosophical substance. Casey knew that the myriad social pathologies plaguing America cannot be solved by throwing money at them. He also knew that true liberty can never come at the expense of another human being. “Without justice, what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers,” Casey said, quoting St. Augustine.

Preternaturally kind and courtly, Casey disdained politicians who abandoned their moral sense in pursuit of power. He refused to campaign for his lieutenant governor, Mark Singel (D-Pa.), after Singel flip-flopped on abortion. For the same reason, Casey refused to campaign for Sen. Harris Wofford (D-Pa.) in 1994. Both were defeated.

There is no doubt that Casey, had he been alive, would have similarly rescinded support for his son Sen. Robert Casey, Jr. (D-Pa.). The younger Casey began his three terms in the U.S. Senate as a pro-life Democrat but ended up sharing nothing with his father other than his name and beetle-browed countenance. By the time Keystone State voters threw him out of office last November, Casey Jr. had fully embraced legalized abortion.

Casey ended his challenge to Clinton when his health dictated it. Suffering from a rare genetic disease called Appalachian familial amyloidosis, Casey underwent a complex heart and liver transplant during his second term as governor. Despite a heroic recovery, Casey came to believe that he could not withstand the rigors of a presidential campaign or a presidential administration. Had Biden or those around him had anything like a similar courage, Biden never would have become president. But he would have been spared the ignominy of being the first president of whom it was asked, “What didn’t he know and when didn’t he know it?”