April 19, 2012
Romney and Bork, a Dangerous Team: People For the American Way Campaign Exposes Romney’s Embrace of Judicial Extremism
Today,
People For the American Way launched a major new campaign – including a
website, a web ad and an exclusive report – exposing Mitt Romney’s
dangerous agenda for America’s courts.
The campaign highlights Romney’s choice of Robert Bork to lead his
constitutional and judicial advisory team. By allying with Bork, a
jurist so extreme he was rejected by a bipartisan majority of the U.S.
Senate 25 years ago, Romney has sent a clear signal that he means to
drag America’s courts even farther to the right, endangering many of
the civil rights, liberties and economic protections won by the
American people over the past five decades.
The ad, Don’t Let Romney Bork America, and
the report, Borking America: What Robert Bork Will Mean to
the Supreme Court and American Justice, can be viewed at www.RomneyCourt.com.
“The debates over health care and immigration have reinforced the
importance of the Supreme Court to all Americans,” said Michael
Keegan, President of People For the American Way.
“However, few are aware of the extreme agenda Mitt Romney has for the
High Court – an agenda exemplified by his close alliance with Robert
Bork.
“In 1987, People For the American Way led the fight to keep Judge Bork
off the Supreme Court,” Keegan continued. “25 years later, we are as
relieved as ever that we succeeded. When Bork was nominated, Americans
across the political spectrum rejected the dangerous political agenda
that he would have brought to the bench – his disdain for modern civil
rights legislation, his acceptance of poll taxes and literacy tests,
his defense of contraception bans and criminal sodomy laws, his
continued privileging of corporations over individuals. Since then, he
has dug his heels even deeper into a view of the law that puts
corporations first and individuals far behind.
“It is frightening that a quarter century after Robert Bork’s
jurisprudence was deemed too regressive for the Supreme Court, a
leading presidential candidate has picked him to shape his legal
policy.”
People For the American Way Senior Fellow Jamie Raskin,
the
author
of
the
report, added: “The return of Robert Bork and his
reactionary jurisprudence to national politics should be a three-alarm
wake-up call for all Americans. In his work on the bench as a judge and
off the bench as a polemicist, Bork has consistently placed
corporations above the government and government above the rights of
the people. The idea that Bork could be central to shaping the Supreme
Court in the 21st century is shocking because he wants to turn the
clock back decades in terms of the civil rights and civil liberties.
His constitutional politics are even more extreme today than in 1987,
when a bipartisan group of 58 senators rejected his nomination to the
Supreme Court.”
The new report and ad review Bork’s record from his days as solicitor general to President Richard Nixon to his turn as co-chair of the Romney campaign’s committee on law, the Constitution and the judiciary. Highlights of Bork’s career include:
- Consistently choosing corporate power over the rights of people. As a judge, Bork regularly took the side of business interests against government regulators trying to hold them accountable, but the side of the government when it was challenged by workers, environmentalists and consumers pressing for more corporate accountability.
- Opposing civil rights, voting rights, reproductive rights, gay rights and individual free speech. Bork disparaged the Civil Rights Act of 1964; defended the use of undemocratic poll taxes and literacy tests in state elections ; disagrees with the Supreme Court ruling that overturned sodomy laws; and believes that the government should be able to jail people for advocating civil disobedience.
- Advocating censorship and blaming American culture first. Bork promotes censorship to combat what he calls the “rot and decadence” of American society, saying “I don’t make any fine distinctions; I’m just advocating censorship.” He writes that “the liberal view of human nature” has thrown American culture into “free fall.”
- Rejecting the separation of church and state. Bork rejects the science of evolution, advocates legalizing school-sponsored prayer and has written that he wants to see the Constitution’s wall of separation between church and state “crumble.”
- Turning back the clock on women's rights: Bork has argued against Supreme Court decisions upholding abortion rights and decisions upholding the right to contraception for single people and even married couples. He believes that the heightened protections of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause don’t apply to women. As a judge, he authored a decision reversing the Secretary of Labor and holding that federal law permits a company to deal with toxic workplace conditions by demanding that female employees be sterilized or lose their jobs.
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