US supreme court
Opinion

The campaign against the president’s zealots will be a major test of strength for civil rights and abortion rights groups. A new Democratic lion is needed

Republican president who is eager to build a clear, conservative majority on the United States supreme court – and too sure of his political ground – overreaches. He picks a rightwing zealot for the open seat created by the retirement of a justice. At stake in the subsequent political battle over his nomination is the constitutional right of American women to have an abortion.
This was the Washington drama that unfolded in 1987 – when the president was Ronald Reagan, and his supreme court nominee was the controversial Robert Bork. Over a quarter of a century later, history is about to repeat itself in the latest crucial political test of the Donald Trump era.
Anthony Kennedy, who this week announced his retirement as a justice of the supreme court, was a decent man. His decisions upholding gay rights and legalising gay marriage will earn him a deserved place in history. Although some of his votes on abortion cases were bad, at the most pivotal moment – in a watershed 1992 decision – he voted to uphold the Roe v Wade supreme court decision to safeguard a woman’s right to an abortion. Granted, Kennedy’s votes in this latest term were consistently awful and solidly conservative, but there were other crucial moments when he was the swing vote and chose to uphold human rights and decency. His replacement, if Trump gets his way, will have none of those moderating tendencies.
Already Trump’s first court pick, Neil Gorsuch, has formed an unholy alliance with the most rightwing justice, Clarence Thomas. The White House will now be hoping that this dynamic duo can become a trio. It’s amazing to think that John Roberts, the conservative chief justice, could actually be the moderating force on the supreme court.

The supreme court nominee Robert Bork (centre) is introduced by President Gerald Ford (left) and Senator Robert Dole at confirmation hearings in 1987.
The supreme court nominee Robert Bork (centre) is introduced by President Gerald Ford (left) and Senator Robert Dole at confirmation hearings in 1987. Photograph: Charles Tasnadi/AP

It has been encouraging to see many Democrats taking the position that they should not hold hearings on any nominee Trump puts forward until after the midterm elections in November. This would only be consistent with the Republicans’ outrageous obstruction of the nomination of Merrick Garland by President Obama. It looks, at first blush, like the 49 Senate Democrats will unite behind this hard line and hang tough, though one can never be sure. And then, if they win control of the Senate in the midterms, the Democrats could actually block whoever it is that Trump nominates. We could see a case of Bork redux.Even without Senate control, the Democrats will need only one Republican to join them in order to delay a vote until after those elections. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, two pro-choice Republican senators, must not hesitate to join arms with the Democrats on this issue.
In the wake of Justice Kennedy’s retirement announcement, I spent the afternoon walking back through history and was reassured by listening to another Kennedy. At the time of the Bork nomination, Ted Kennedy, the Democratic senator and liberal lion, roared loud and long, delivering a coruscating speech that proved to be a lethal blow.
That speech is worth reading or listening to in its entirety. The most famous lines still resonate. “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors  in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens, for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.”
Conservatives have spent decades defending Bork and lambasting the Kennedy speech as a below-the-belt, false caricature of his views. But it was inescapably true that if Bork had been confirmed – and abortion rights had been overturned – back-alley abortions might have indeed become the norm in the US once again. Ted Kennedy was right that “the current delicate balance of the supreme court” was ill-suited for someone whose “rigid ideology will tip the scales of justice against the kind of country America is and ought to be”.           
When Trump nominates his dream choice next month, almost 31 years later to the day, the president’s nominee will also be guaranteed to oppose abortion rights – and certain to be a vote to overturn Roe versus Wade. Who now will be the Senate’s Democratic lion to defeat the forces of reaction? Who will be our vital and dependable Ted Kennedy?
In October 1987, Bork’s nomination to the supreme court was defeated 58-42 by the Senate. The campaign against Reagan’s pick was a major test of strength for an alliance of civil rights and abortion rights groups. These forces must be a firewall once again.
After the defeat, Reagan was forced to pick a less ideologically pure candidate for the court. It was Anthony Kennedy.
Let’s hope that history does repeat itself and that, in the fight to replace this Kennedy, a passionate and reliable defender of women’s rights emerges to be the Ted Kennedy of our day.

• Jill Abramson is a Guardian US columnist