“Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and other top Democrats want their Republican colleagues, who control the Senate and wield enough votes to scuttle Obama’s nomination, to pledge to confirm a new nominee before the president leaves office.”
Bwahahahahahaha. He Harry, remember Robert Bork, you idiot?
Ted Kennedy (D-HELL) led the way. Remember?
History shows that U.S. Presidents were once virtually always given the benefit of the doubt regarding judicial appointments to the federal courts, except in the rare cases of serious ethical questions or dubious qualifications. It was a good system, and the right system, and both parties followed it, realizing that the ideological mix in the courts was fluid and cyclical, and that today’s new conservative judge would eventually be offset by the appointee of the next liberal President, and vice versa.
Democrats destroyed that tradition and accord on judicial appointments when in 1987, the Senate Democrats blocked President Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork, who had been selected by President Reagan to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. Reagan, it can be argued, lit the fuse by nominating Bork despite warnings by Democrats, in the also traditional “advise†part of the nomination process, that he was not to their liking, and would face more than the usual opposition. But Reagan had been elected in two landslides, and it seemed reasonable for him to claim that the Right had earned the opportunity to have a conservative heavyweight on the Supreme Court.
By any previous standard, Bork was such a heavyweight, and an unusually well-qualified one. Democrats, however, had been spoiled by the long, long tenure of a very liberal Supreme Court majority led by Earl Warren, and the succeeding Burger Court had proven to be surprisingly moderate, in part because several Justices had moved to the left to counter the influx of conservative jurists like William Rehnquist. Judge Bork, however, would be replacing Lewis Powell, one of the Court’s moderates and a frequent swing-vote (much like Justice Kennedy today), and the former Solicitor General had a well-earned reputation for being frighteningly smart, impressively persuasive, and as conservative as they come, all bolstered by impeccable scholarship. The Left feared that Bork would lead a conservative judicial revolution on the scale of the Warren Court’s liberal one—which, by the way, the Republicans and conservatives lived with and survived, though complaining mightily—so Democrats decided to blow up the tradition of reciprocity and comity.
First, the American Bar Association, which then was supposed to render an objective assessment of any nominated judge’s qualifications for the Court, gave Bork a low rating, thus fertilizing the ground for attacks on his nomination. This reflected the strong liberal bias in the ABA, and was, frankly, a disgrace: it violated the spirit of the groups own stated ethical rules by claiming an objectivity in its national assignment that it knew it was incapable of delivering. Then Democratic allies like the NAACP and the Civil Liberties Union coordinated with the party to–and there is no other word for it—destroy Bork’s reputation and portray him as a rights-opposing monster, which he was not.
The low point in Bork’s destruction, for which he was understandably unprepared since it had never happened to any nominee of his caliber before, was the vicious calumny spoken by Sen. Ted Kennedy. Its substance can only be defended on the unethical basis that it worked:
“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy … President Reagan is still our president. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice..â€
FUDH !