( – promoted by lowkell)
Lately, Barbara Comstock has taken to declaring how she is focused on supposedly sensible, bipartisan solutions for Northern Virginia, a strange posture for the woman who headed the RNC’s effort to destroy Vice President Al Gore’s reputation and was a close associate of the infamous Monica Goodling – of DOJ US Attorney scandal. For details on this part of Comstock's history, see here.
But as we already know, Barbara Comstock is anything but a moderate. For the gory details of her extreme voting record, see here.
Upon closer scrutiny, Comstock’s record gets even worse: She has identified herself as a dedicated admirer of Judge Robert Bork, one of the most extreme arch-conservative legal thinkers, whose views were so far out of the mainstream that his Supreme Court nomination was rejected by a 58-42 vote in the 1980s. Comstock was the chief patron of a bill in the House of Delegates, HR 67 honoring Judge Bork – despite his reputation. See here
What makes Bork so extreme that it calls her judgment into question? Based on articles at ThinkProgress and here, controversial stances Bork has taken include:
1) Opposition To Civil Rights Act: Shortly before Congress passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned whites-only lunch counters and other forms of discrimination, Bork criticized such an approach as morally repugnant. “The principle of such legislation is that if I find your behavior ugly by my standards, moral or aesthetic, and if you prove stubborn about adopting my view of the situation, I am justified in having the state coerce you into more righteous paths. That is itself a principle of unsurpassed ugliness.”
2) No Constitutional Protection for Women and People with Disabilities: Bork also claimed that the Constitution does not shield women from gender discrimination. In Bork’s words, “I do think the equal protection clause probably should be kept to things like race and ethnicity.” By this same “logic” laws protecting people with disabilities from discrimination such as the Americans with Disabilities Act would not pass legal muster. Recently he has gone further and denied the existence of discrimination against women. See here.
More following the jump….
3) Hostility to the First Amendment: Bork has declared “Constitutional protection should be accorded only to speech that is explicitly political. There is no basis for judicial intervention to protect any other form of expression, be it scientific, literary or that variety of expression we call obscene or pornographic.”
4) Fired the Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox at President Nixon’s behest after Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus refused to do so because of commitments that had been made to Congress not to remove the Watergate prosecutor except in instances of gross improprieties. This action was widely known as the Saturday Night Massacre and nearly precipitated a constitutional crisis. For more on this grim episode, see the Washington Post from that day.
5) Opposes Personal Privacy: Critic of exclusionary rule which prevents states from benefiting from illegal search and seizure. See Alternet. Blasted Griswold v. Connecticut decision barring states from regulating use of contraception against married couples as “utterly specious” and a “time bomb.”
Does this sound like a mainstream jurist? I think NOT. If this is Barbara Comstock’s idea of justice, I think it is pretty clear that the mainstream voters of the 34th House District need to look elsewhere for mainstream pragmatic leadership. Fortunately there is such an alternative and her name is Pamela Danner. For more on her and how you can help, go to Danner for Delegates.
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