Romney Courts the Right, Threatens Equality, with Bork
Robyn Blumner

Let's all take a moment and remember Robert Bork. To help jog your memory, here is his curriculum vitae in a nutshell: President Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre hatchetman, conservative D.C. federal appeals court judge, failed Reagan nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, right-wing commentator, law professor and a verb.

You might think I'm dredging up old history by remembering the man whose judicial philosophy was so radically out-of-step that a bipartisan Senate vote of 58-42 kept him off the high court in 1987. But alas, I'm not the one who dusted off the codger. Mitt Romney did. Bork is Romney's pick to co-chair his presidential campaign advisory committee on the law, the Constitution and the judiciary.

Bork is one scary choice as a presidential adviser, as the report "Borking America" by People For the American Way makes clear. If Romney wants to broadcast to women that he plans to make our lives difficult, he could not have chosen better. Bork represents a school of thought that tells women the Bill of Rights is not for them.

Just for starters, Bork would battle against decades of Supreme Court precedent, which holds that the Equal Protection Clause closely guards against gender discrimination. He was outraged by the Supreme Court's 1996 ruling which told the Virginia Military Institute that it had to stop discriminating and admit women to its all-male program. Bork wrote in a diatribe against feminism: "VMI is only one example of a feminized Court transforming the Constitution."

Remember how Republican primary candidates went after birth control? Well, Bork is the perfect compliment to that view. He doesn't cotton to the idea that the Constitution protects reproductive freedom and the right to privacy. Had Bork been a Supreme Court justice when Connecticut outlawed the use of birth control even for married couples, he would have voted to leave the law in place, rather than strike it down as the Court did in Griswold v. Connecticut.

That was just one of many stances that horrified the public and most Senators -- including six Republicans -- during a confirmation process so tumultuous that it led to the coining of the verb "to Bork." A nominee who gets Borked is publicly vilified by using his own stated views against him.

But Romney is not horrified by Bork; he's delighted to find such a simpatico legal thinker. By choosing Bork as a key adviser, Romney is telegraphing that he intends to appoint judges who are similarly inclined. Currently, the Supreme Court is ideologically split pretty evenly, if somewhat conservative. If one Bork-like appointee replaces a liberal justice, women's rights are toast.

African-Americans, workers, consumers and environmentalists don't fare much better in Bork's America. For instance, he supports the constitutionality of literacy tests and poll taxes in state elections -- those notorious instruments that the South used to keep African-Americans from voting. Imagine how easily Bork's acolytes would green-light the passel of new voting laws in Republican-controlled states designed to discourage minority voting.

Want to have a chance in Bork's Court? You better be rich and powerful, according to an analysis of his record as a judge on the D.C. U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by the Public Citizen Litigation Group. In split decisions, Bork always sided with businesses in legal battles with the government, and alternatively, nearly always sided with the government -- most notably the Reagan administration -- when challengers were workers, consumers and environmentalists. Public Citizen found that Bork's rulings offered no "consistent application of judicial restraint." Rather, it was the identity of the parties litigating that predicted Bork's vote.

Romney is so desperate to show he's conservative enough for today's Republican Party that he's chosen to elevate a dangerous legal thinker who wants to reverse social progress and deny justice to average people. During Romney's previous run for president, he said, "I wish [Bork] were already on the Supreme Court" because he is "the kind of brilliant conservative mind that this court could use."

Ladies, we have been warned.