KINDER'S COMMENTARY: COURT NOMINATIONS MATTER -- A LOT

So this is what those fierce battles were about over confirming Supreme Court nominees. So this is why the liberal left fought so hard, and with occasional success, to keep Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas and other conservative nominees off the Supreme Court.

During the Bork battle in the fall of 1987, I wrote in this space: "The Goebbels-like campaign liberals mounted against Judge Bork was the most outrageous in our history. It featured intentional distortions, shrill personal attacks, blatant intellectual dishonesty, witness intimidation, demagoguery and lies. All this was well-received in the U.S. Senate, once known as the world's greatest deliberative body. ..."

Again, this is why it was worth it to liberals, four years later, to abandon all previous standards, to engage, far past the 11th hour, in the politics of personal destruction, with a shamelessness previously unimagined, in the confirmation battle over Clarence Thomas. With the Thomas nomination, these liberal opponents signalled that all previous rules were off, that raw sewage could be dredged out of unconfirmed FBI reports, and even that it was worth it to shove out a former employee who had followed him from job to job and benefited time and again from his patronage, to tell her pathetic lies on national TV. As with everything else with liberals, strip away the pious rhetoric, and you see, again and again: It's about power.

Missourians, perhaps more than citizens of any state, should now reflect on the meaning of the great Supreme Court confirmation battles of recent years. They should also reflect on the great lesson of this week's ruling in the Kansas City school desegregation case. It is this: Supreme Court and other judicial appointments matter. Elections and their outcomes -- with the right to appoint judges -- matter. It matters who earns the right to wield this kind of power.

Consider the president who appointed U.S. District Judge Russell Clark of the Western District of Missouri. He is Jimmy Carter, the pious poet of the peanut patch. A card-carrying liberal, Judge Clark is the man who -- cooking up crazy judicial theories out of thin air and declaring them to be the law -- has ordered the Missouri to pay over $1.3 billion to gold-plate Kansas City schools. This is the sort of judge you can expect from today's Democratic Party, dominated as it is by the loony left and staffed with every McGovernite not now playing in a rock band somewhere.

Now consider some other names. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, appointed by President Nixon. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, appointed by President Reagan. Justice Antonin Scalia, appointed by President Reagan. Justice Anthony Kennedy, appointed by President Reagan. Justice Clarence Thomas, appointed by President Bush. Republican appointees, all.

The latter five constitute the majority in Monday's historic ruling slapping down Judge Clark. This bare, 5-4 majority said Clark clearly went too far and ruled that these desegregation cases can actually be brought to an end. In effect, the court ruled that much of the Clark-ordered spending Missourians have been forced to endure is flat-out unlawful. Interestingly, the same five justices constitute an identical majority in the Colorado case that slowed down the affirmative action bandwagon that has rolled across America this last quarter-century.

Elections matter. Supreme Court and other judicial nominations matter.

The Kansas City school desegregation case, driven as it was by Judge Clark's key role in it, is a disgrace of literally world-historical proportions. It is liberalism's domestic Vietnam: a test case where every crackpot liberal notion about unlimited spending to improve education was tested for 10 years and found -- not merely wanting -- but catastrophically wrong.

Elections matter. Supreme Court and other judicial nominations matter.

Every Missourian should understand this. And every Missourian should know who gave them Judge Russell Clark, and who will give us more Russell Clark wannabes in the future, as against those who gave them Rehnquist and Scalia, O'Connor and Kennedy and Thomas.

When he visited Cape Girardeau seven years ago this spring, Judge Bork told his audience that the struggle over his nomination was merely one battle in what is nothing less than a long-running "war for control of our legal culture."

Yes, indeed. And today, Missourians can celebrate a victory for representative democracy, handed them by five Supreme Court justices who have taught us all again why elections matter, and why it matters who gets to don those black robes for a lifetime appointment.

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.