BCT Editorial – 11/3/05

This page was last updated on November 3, 2005.

Borked; Editorial; Beaver County Times; November 3, 2005.

Below is a detailed critique of the subject editorial.

“Thanks to conservatives, no judicial candidate can be ‘borked’ again.

“Dallas Morning News columnist William McKenzie wrote that conservatives’ attack on Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers was no different from the left’s tarring-and-feathering of Judge Robert Bork in his 1987 confirmation hearing.

“Because of that, the ‘conservative movement can never, ever play the Bork card again,’ he wrote.

“Good point.”

[RWC] Once again we have the Times and its sources trying to rewrite history.

The editorial’s position might be reasonable if the same things happened to Ms. Miers as happened to Judge Bork. As an aside, Judge Bork was born in Pittsburgh. All of the criticism about Ms. Miers had to do with her qualifications and the fact she had no relevant paper trail to give us an indication of her judicial philosophy. Further, some of her statements over time appeared to contradict each other. To the best of my knowledge, no responsible conservatives launched any personal attacks against Ms. Miers.

Let’s look at what happened to Judge Bork. Bork served as Solicitor General, acting Attorney General, and was a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit for five years before his nomination. Liberals knew they couldn’t attack Judge Bork’s credentials. As a result, less than an hour after Judge Bork’s nomination by President Reagan, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) got up in front of the Senate and said, “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, children could not be taught about evolution.” There was nothing in Bork’s record to support such BS, but that didn’t stop the character assassination from continuing. It got so bad that some in the press even got Bork’s video rental records in the hope they would embarrass him. They didn’t, but this episode resulted in the Video Privacy Protection Act.

Now, compare the Bork and Miers episodes and tell me they were remotely similar.