There’s a little known ritual that takes place at Arlington National Cemetery most mornings. This one has nothing to do with the Changing of the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns. Although it does have to do with another form of the changing of the guard, the guardians of the Senate.
Almost every morning he’s in town Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr. stops by this grave, not for somber remembrance, but gloatingly. The ritual started shortly after Senator Edward M. Kennedy was buried here close to his two brothers, John and Robert. It’s been ten years.
The genesis goes back 32 years to 1 July 1987:
Mr. President, I oppose the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, and I urge the Senate to reject it.
In the Watergate scandal of 1973, two distinguished Republicans—Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus—put integrity and the Constitution ahead of loyalty to a corrupt President. They refused to do Richard Nixon's dirty work, and they refused to obey his order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. The deed devolved on Solicitor General Robert Bork, who executed the unconscionable assignment that has become one of the darkest chapters for the rule of law in American history.
That act—later ruled illegal by a Federal court—is sufficient, by itself, to disqualify Mr. Bork from this new position to which he has been nominated. The man who fired Archibald Cox does not deserve to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Mr. Bork should also be rejected by the Senate because he stands for an extremist view of the Constitution and the role of the Supreme Court that would have placed him outside the mainstream of American constitutional jurisprudence in the 1960s, let alone the 1980s. He opposed the Public Accommodations Civil Rights Act of 1964. He opposed the one-man one-vote decision of the Supreme Court the same year. He has said that the First Amendment applies only to political speech, not literature or works of art or scientific expression.
Under the twin pressures of academic rejection and the prospect of Senate rejection, Mr. Bork subsequently retracted the most neanderthal of these views on civil rights and the first amendment. But his mind-set is no less ominous today.
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 would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.
America is a better and freer nation than Robert Bork thinks. Yet in the current delicate balance of the Supreme Court, his rigid ideology will tip the scales of justice against the kind of country America is and ought to be.
The damage that President Reagan will do through this nomination, if it is not rejected by the Senate, could live on far beyond the end of his presidential term. 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 on the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a statement by Benjamin L. Hooks and Ralph G. Neas of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights opposing the nomination may be printed in the Record.
And with that speech the nomination of Robert Bork was dead. The spot went to Anthony Kennedy. But for Republicans it was far from over. And for a first term little known Senator from Kentucky it was motivation. The then 45 year old Mitch McConnell vowed to get even with Senator Edward M. Kennedy. And for the next 32 years as he rose through the power of the Senate and the Republican Party Mitch McConnell has kept his focus on that revenge.
Shortly after Ted Kennedy was buried Mitch decided to stop by Ted’s grave. At the time he thought it was just to say good riddance, but in a moment when no one was around he was filled with rage and pissed on the grave of his former senatorial colleague. Afterwards he was filled with a multitude of emotions, but among them, satisfaction. But next time he would have to be smarter, cagier. Next time he brought it in a container.
Through the years the container has changed, but the contents haven’t. But in recent years the supplier of the content has changed. The suppliers have been many. Every nomination for the Federal bench supplies a urine sample, somewhere along the way Mitch McConnell has been the recipient of a portion of those samples. So with every unqualified nominee confirmed by the McConnell controlled Senate, McConnell has spread there piss gleefully over Ted Kennedy’s grave.
But for Senator Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr. the sweetest revenge came when he poured the content contributed by Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh now occupies the seat Robert Bork was denied.
Friday, Dec 13, 2019 · 4:11:02 PM +00:00
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TexDem
If you’re keeping count. McConnell has managed to get about 270 Federal judges confirmed in Trump’s three years. An average of 90 a year. That means we have another 90 coming next year for a total of 360. The damage being done to our judiciary isn’t fictional.