- Geoffrey R. Stone, HuffPo: Judicial Filibusters: Partisanship Run Amok
- Robert Bork, Wikipedia entry
Yesterday, 42 Senate Republicans (joined by one conservative Democrat) used the filibuster to block the Senate's consideration of Goodwin Liu. Although 53 senators voted to invoke cloture, the minority succeeded in preventing the Senate from even voting on the nomination.So Liu's nomination didn't even get a vote. Stone says:
To justify their behavior, some Republicans invoke the Bork nomination battle as a relevant precedent, but their thinking on that score is completely wrong-headed. Bork was not the target of a filibuster. He was defeated in a straight up-or-down vote of 58 against and 42 in favor. If Liu were given such a vote, he would clearly be confirmed. The distance we have travelled over the past twenty-five years is a good measure of the extent to which we now live in a world of partisanship run amuck.Ah, yes: Robert Bork.
Bork was known for his belief in the judicial principle of "originalism": that judges should be guided by the framers' original understanding of the Constitution. His stated belief that the Constitution contains no general "right to privacy" provoked fears that he would vote to reverse the Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. A fierce critic of the Warren and Burger courts for what he considered to be "judicial activism," and who stated a desire to roll back those courts' civil rights decisions, Bork shot into the public notice for his role as Nixon's Solicitor General in the Watergate drama known as the Saturday Night Massacre.
When Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox requested tapes of his Oval Office conversations. Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox; instead, Richardson resigned. Next in line was Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, who also resigned, making Bork the Acting Attorney General. Bork complied with Nixon's order and fired Cox.
President Reagan nominated Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, igniting a firestorm of protest from Democrats. Bork is one of only three Supreme Court nominees ever to be opposed by the leftist American Civil Liberties Union, along with William Rehnquist and Samuel Alito. Ted Kennedy attacked him on the floor of the Senate in the following terms:
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.Wow. Pretty strong stuff.
In the end, the Senate rejected Bork's confirmation, with 42 Senators voting in favor and 58 voting against -- but at least he got a straight up-or-down vote on the Senate floor; Goodwin Liu didn't make it that far.
This is only the fourth time in U.S. history that an appointment to the Court of Appeals has been blocked by filibuster. The first three were Lyndon Johnson's nomination of Abe Fortas in 1968; Carter's nomination of Stephen Breyer in 1980 (though that filibuster was unsuccessful); and George W. Bush's nomination of Miguel Estrada in 2001.
Yet another example of present-day Republican obstructionism.
0 comments:
Post a Comment