Reagan Asks Public to Back Bork Nomination : Says Opponents Are 'Liberal Special-Interest Groups' That Seek to Politicize Court System

By DON IRWIN

Oct. 4, 1987 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — President Reagan called Saturday for public support in his uphill fight to win Senate confirmation of Judge Robert H. Bork, his nominee for the Supreme Court, and bitterly characterized the opposition as “liberal special-interest groups (that) seek to politicize the court system.”

Calling Bork the target of “a distorted, unseemly political campaign,” Reagan said in his weekly radio talk that foes of the nomination are “determined to thwart the desire of the American people for judges who understand the real role of the judiciary, judges who seek to interpret the law, not make it, judges who will enforce the law and bring criminals to justice, not turn them loose and make our streets unsafe.”

“Well, don’t let them do it,” Reagan said as he ended the toughly worded broadcast from his weekend retreat at Camp David, Md. “Tell your senators to resist the politicization of our court system. Tell them you support the appointment of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.”

That appointment, subject of three weeks of increasingly bitter hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, is scheduled to come up for a committee vote Tuesday. The Democratic-controlled committee has authority to table the nomination, but Reagan has said he will be satisfied if it is referred to the Senate floor without a recommendation, and the committee appears likely to do that.

A partial tally of Senate sentiment prepared Saturday by the Associated Press showed that, of the Senate’s 100 members, 32 support Bork and 26 have declared their opposition. Of the announced supporters, 30 are Republicans and two Democrats, while 24 Democrats and two Republicans are opposed. However, 28 of those who have not announced their positions are Democrats, and a substantial majority of them are expected to oppose the nomination. At least 50 votes are needed for confirmation.

Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, speaking Saturday at a campaign stop in Manchester, N.H., said he did not think the Bork nomination was lost, but added: “I think it’s a tough battle. It’s uphill, uphill.”

Reagan presented his selection of Bork in the context of a philosophical battle with liberalism in which he claimed success by doing “exactly the opposite of what the old-time liberals here in Washington recommended” in the areas of economic and foreign policy.

‘Further Their Agenda’

“Many of them viewed the courts as a place to put judges who would further their agenda, even if it meant being soft on crime; interpreting the Constitution to please the special interests, and encouraging jurists to make laws that would never be passed by your elected representatives or approved by you, the people,” Reagan said.

Bork was picked, Reagan continued, as “a man who would be faithful to the kind of judicial restraint envisioned by our Founding Fathers.” By contrast, he said, “liberal special-interest groups seek to politicize the court system, to exercise a chilling effect on judges, to intimidate them into making decisions, not on the basis of the law or the merits of the case, but on the basis of a litmus test or a response to political pressure.”

It is because those groups are “gravely concerned that Judge Bork’s appointment will mean a Supreme Court that practices judicial restraint as our forefathers intended,” Reagan said, that the Bork nomination has produced “a distorted, unseemly political campaign” when it “deserves a careful, highly civil examination of his record.”

Opposition Groups

Reagan named no groups, but the strongest objections to the Bork nomination have come from civil rights groups, notably the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, and organizations that strive to advance civil liberties. They include the AFL-CIO, the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way and a number of women’s groups.

Even Bork’s critics have given high marks to his professional attainments, both as an appeals court judge and as a professor at Yale University Law School, although some questioned his decision as solicitor general in President Richard M. Nixon’s Justice Department to follow the embattled President’s orders during the so-called Saturday Night Massacre in 1973 and fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor in the Watergate scandal.

The most telling criticisms have been leveled against Bork’s statements, writings and opinions in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties. They were underscored Thursday when two influential senators disclosed their intention to oppose the nomination.

Southerner Objects

Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), a bellwether Southern Democrat, objected to Bork’s past record of opposition to civil rights legislation that has, among other things, substantially increased the black electorate in the South.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, braved the wrath of the White House by announcing a reluctant decision to oppose Bork because of doubts about the nominee’s views on constitutional guarantees of free speech and equal protection of the law.