I was just reading this article and remembering how much heat Reagan took for proposing this system and how he is now vindicated. If it were up to the Democrats,there would we have been no protection for Hawaii and Japan against North Korea:

As they debate and discuss various options at the United Nations and in capitals around the globe, the rudimentary U.S. missile defense system is poised to shoot down anything launched from North Korea that threatens the American homeland or the critical interests of our regional allies like Japan and Australia.

Noticeably absent are the voices of those who, since President Reagan first proposed such a system in 1984, have fought development and deployment of the missile defense system the U.S. must now depend upon in dealing with North Korea. These folks have claimed over and over that the system they derisively call “?Star Wars”? can’?t possibly work, would be too expensive, would incite a new world arms race, etc., etc. Names that come to mind in this regard include senators like Joe Biden, D-Del., Jack Reed, D-R.I., Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Carl Levin, D-Mich., and the Clinton-Gore administration that delayed and dilly-dallied with work on missile defense for most of the ’90s.

[…]

Second, they will no doubt protest to high heaven, but “Star Wars” critics must bear the major burden of responsibility for the delays and setbacks that have prevented the missile defense system from becoming fully operational long before the present crisis with North Korea. There have been technological problems, especially in the very early stages, but those were temporary and subject to American technological prowess.
Far more serious have been the setbacks engineered by the critics -? like then-Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell’?s maneuvers to kill the first Bush administration’?s Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (G-PALS) plan, the Clinton-Gore gutting of the Strategic Defense Initiative office in 1993 and the delaying tactics used by Senate Democrats in the first years of this decade to reduce the current program’s funding.

When Joe Biden runs for President, keep in mind that if he had his way, Hawaii and Japan would have no protection from an incoming missile. And even if he doesn’t last through the primary, keep in mind that if the Democrats had gotten their way we and our allies would have had no protection against North Korea. They care more about trying to force universal health care on those of us who don’t want it, instead of concentrating constitutional duty of protecting the American people. The federal government isn’t constitutionally obligated to provide affordable health care but they are obligated to provide us with protection from our enemies. It appears that the Democrats in the Senate and a Democratic President rejected that duty because it was too costly and they didn’t think it would work. Well, they were wrong. Do you want to give them a second chance?