Heflin Foresees Bork Vote Delay Until November

President Reagan on Saturday stepped up the pressure for quick confirmation of his Supreme Court nominee, Robert H. Bork, but a key member of the Senate Judiciary Committee predicted that a vote on Bork might not occur until Thanksgiving.

In his weekly radio address, Reagan praised Bork as a “brilliant legal scholar and a fair-minded jurist who believes his role is to interpret the law, not make it.” He urged the Senate to “keep politics out of the confirmation process and promptly schedule hearings.”

But Sen. Howell Heflin (D-Ala.) said the court probably will begin its new term in October with one vacancy.

A Key Swing Vote

“I think he could either be confirmed or rejected if it goes to the full Senate by, perhaps, maybe Nov. 1, or maybe even Thanksgiving,” Heflin said on Cable News Network’s “Newsmaker Saturday” program.

A conservative who often has supported Administration judicial nominees, Heflin is considered a key swing vote on the Judiciary Committee, on which Democrats hold an 8-6 edge. Hearings on the Bork nomination could take more than a month and probably will not begin until September because the Senate will be in recess next month, Senate staff members said.

Administration strategy, reflected in Reagan’s statements, is to portray opposition to Bork’s judicial philosophy as being a step toward improper politicalization of the judiciary. Opponents of the nomination, for their part, say it is Reagan who is seeking to put his political stamp on the high court by nominating the conservative Bork to replace the more moderate Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. Opponents have already begun a campaign to defeat Bork that has few parallels in the annals of court nomination battles. The campaign will focus on Bork’s criticism of key Supreme Court decision on issues like abortion and civil rights.

Most opposition to Bork is expected to come from Democrats, who control the Senate 54 to 46, but at least one Republican senator, Bob Packwood of Oregon, has announced he will “do everything I can to lead the opposition” because of Bork’s views on the high court’s 1973 abortion decision, Roe vs. Wade. Packwood, one of the leading Senate supporters of abortion rights, spoke Friday in Eugene, Ore.

Bork, in 1981, called the decision that eliminated state laws that banned abortions an “unconstitutional decision” and a “wholly unjustifiable judicial usurpation of state legislative authority.” He has not said, however, whether he would vote to reverse the decision now that it has been on the books for more than a decade.

The National Abortion Rights Action League plans to make strategy for defeating Bork the major topic of its annual meeting, which will take place in Washington this week, the group’s spokesman said.

Similarly, Benjamin L. Hooks, executive director of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said his group, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, will “especially focus on defeating Bork” at its annual meeting, which begins in New York today.

‘Would Wipe Out Gains’

Putting Bork on the court “would in effect wipe out all of our gains of the past 30 years,” Hooks said.

Bork at various points in his career has attacked civil rights decisions, including the high court’s 1948 case eliminating racial restrictions on property deeds, the 1966 decision barring poll taxes that some states had used to keep blacks and poor whites from voting and the 1978 Bakke decision, which upheld limited use of affirmative action plans that give preferences to racial minorities.

In the 1948 case, the high court said courts would not enforce clauses in property deeds that forbade the sale of property to blacks, Jews and other members of racial or religious minorities. The discovery that William H. Rehnquist had such a covenant in the deed to property he owned became an issue last year when his nomination to be chief justice was before the Senate.

Rehnquist and his supporters maintained then that the covenant was irrelevant because the 1948 decision made it a nullity. Bork, however, extensively criticized that ruling in a 1971 article in the Indiana Law Journal, saying it improperly converted the Constitution’s ban on discrimination by government into a prohibition on discrimination by individuals.

Bork’s criticism of the poll tax decision came during hearings on his confirmation to be the Nixon Administration’s solicitor general in 1973. There was “no evidence . . . of racial discrimination in the use of the poll tax” challenged in the high court case, he said then.

Writing on the Bakke case, Bork said the court’s opinion, written by Powell, “offends . . . ideas of common justice.” The decision is “at bottom a statement that (the Constitution) allows some, but not too much, reverse discrimination,” Bork wrote in a 1978 article in the Wall Street Journal.