Reagan, Not the Left, Started Partisan Fires: Michael Kinsley

Oct. 28 (Bloomberg) -- The grown-ups (i.e., voters) willtell you, of course, that they don’t care who started it: Theywant it to stop. But there can be no truce in the nastiness ofrecent years between Democrats and Republicans until Joe Noceraapologizes for his New York Times column last week blaming itall on the Democrats.

Joe, an old (and, I hope, not former) friend, says it allstarted in 1987, when Democrats in the Senate rejected PresidentRonald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork for a seat on theSupreme Court. Joe is right that the campaign against Bork wasbased on his ideology, not his qualifications (he was aprofessor at Yale and a federal appeals court judge), and thatit got nasty. And he’s right that this was something new inSupreme Court nomination battles, though Bork was far from thefirst presidential nominee to be rejected. But it was Reagan,not the Senate, who changed the unwritten rules by nominatingsuch an ideologue in the first place. Reagan chose Bork based onhis ideology, not his alleged brilliance. The Senate wasentitled to judge him by the same standard.