GOP Must Reject Venomous Kennedy Tactics

Supreme Court Justice David Souter's decision to retire in June gives President Barack Obama his first opportunity to reshape the high court. We expect Obama to nominate someone with a strong background of public service and scholarship. This nominee is likely to be liberal. Our hope is that this liberal is pragmatic, like Justice Stephen Breyer — not the sort of 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals extremist who thinks the Constitution can be rewritten on a whim.

But for now we'd like to focus on the confirmation process itself. Since 1987, it has often degenerated into a vicious political scrum. That was the year President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, a deeply conservative federal appellate judge, former solicitor general and brilliant constitutional scholar, to replace moderate retiring Justice Lewis Powell.

This infuriated liberals. And so within an hour of Reagan's press conference introducing Bork as his nominee, Sen. Ted Kennedy took to the Senate floor to declare "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, (and) writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government."

The screed grossly distorted Bork's record. But similar charges repeated endlessly — combined with a whispering campaign that depicted the bushy-haired, quirky Bork as a "strange" man whose wife was a Holocaust denier — doomed his nomination.

We've since seen two more such spectacles: In 1991, with President George H.W. Bush's nomination of Clarence Thomas, and in 2006, with President George W. Bush's nomination of Samuel Alito.

Liberal interest groups couldn't very well argue that Thomas, an African-American, was a racist. So they called him a self-hating black and an Uncle Tom, in addition to being a sexist with a taste for pornography. Thomas was barely confirmed on a 52-48 vote.

It was back to the Bork playbook with Alito. Citing the fact that he had once belonged to a Princeton alumni group whose members included a few troglodytes, Kennedy again took the Senate floor to denounce a Republican president's high court nominee as racist and sexist. Despite wide admiration for his brilliance and personal qualities, Alito was confirmed on a vote of only 58-42.

This history is shameful. But we fear it is destined to be repeated by Republican senators and conservative interest groups who see a chance for pay-back against a Democratic nominee from a president who voted against both Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts.

We urge them to meet a higher standard. Obama's nominee should be thoroughly grilled, her or his past carefully combed. But, please, no ad hominem attacks. They aren't honest and they aren't helpful — and they say far more about the attacker's character than the target's.

REPRINTED FROM THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE.

DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.