In a recent op/ed for The Washington Times, Ken Blackwell, a key adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, wrote that the liberal mainstream media is attempting to “Bork” Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions.
“Borking” is a term used to refer to an unfair mischaracterization of a presidential appointee for the purpose of stalling or otherwise preventing Senate confirmation. The term comes from the lengths Democrats went to in 1987 to prevent Judge Robert Bork’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Bork had an impeccable record as a Yale Law School professor, a former Solicitor General of the United States, an acting Attorney General and judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. He also was a constitutional “originalist,” much like Antonin Scalia, which drew the ire of Democrats, who attempted to destroy the judge both personally and professionally.
Blackwell wrote in his article the same was being done to Sessions:
The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times spent more than a month working on stories that were exclusively about Jeff Sessions and race, to run before Mr. Sessions’ Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Their aim was clear: to try to define Mr. Sessions as a caricature, stepping straight out of the segregated South and into the Department of Justice, ignoring his 20-year career as a United States senator.
There’s only one reason why large news organizations invest so much time, energy and money—they sent reporters to Alabama, each of whom spent a week there—to do these biased stories, and it’s time someone said what it is. The reason is because someone, somewhere, deep down doesn’t believe a white man from Alabama should be the attorney general of the United States.
That’s every bit as racist as saying a black man from Chicago shouldn’t be president of the United States.
Blackwell defended his comments in an interview Thursday with Raheem Kassam on Sirius/XM’s “Breitbart News Daily” program.
“Their attempt to define him not by his last 20 years in the Senate, but by the notion that he was white, conservative, evangelical and from the South meant, in their view, that he could not escape the label of being a racist,” he said. “They don’t use facts. They don’t use measurable, observable behavior and activity. They, in fact, create this false image of a guy who they would like to bring down because they see him as the tip of the spear of moving us back to a system that respects the rule of law.”
Blackwell said the coordinated media smear campaign is part of a political attack meant to destroy Sessions. Pure and simple, he said, the left is attempting to “Bork” the senator, just as they did in the 1980s with Judge Bork himself.
Ultimately, he predicted, the effort would fail. {eoa}
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