The New York Times' Linda Greenhouse explained in an op-ed why conservatives are wrong to cite Senate Democrats' 1987 rejection of nominee Robert H. Bork as justification for blocking Merrick Garland's nomination now.

In her March 16 op-ed, Greenhouse laid out the misinformation surrounding the argument that because Democracts blocked Bork -- President Reagan's choice for the Supreme Court -- Republicans can “justify the decision to block any Obama Supreme Court nominee.”

According to Greenhouse, Bork's rejection wasn't based on political obstruction, but on the fact that “a majority of the Senate, including six Republicans who voted against him, didn't like what he said” during his hearing. While Senators in 1987 heard extensively from Bork during that hearing, current Republican Senators -- backed by right-wing media -- are saying they "won't even meet" with Garland. The idea that Democrats engaged in similar obstructionism with Bork is just one of the many myths conservatives and right-wing media are deploying to justify their partisan obstruction of President Obama's pick to fill the Supreme Court vacancy.

As explained by Greenhouse in The New York Times:

[T]he battle over the Bork nomination is the memory Republican politicians and conservative commentators and interest groups reach for to justify the decision to block any Obama Supreme Court nominee. “It started in 1987, when Senate Democrats launched an all-out assault against the nomination of Judge Robert Bork,” Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said on the Senate floor earlier this month. “Democrats have been blowing up the appointment process piecemeal since they turned Judge Robert Bork's last name into a verb back in 1987,” the columnist Jonah Goldberg wrote in National Review.

In other words, the message to Democrats is: You did it to one of ours, so now we'll do it to one of yours. Really? To Merrick B. Garland, the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who after two decades on the bench is one of the country's most respected and experienced federal judges?

Bring it on.

Even allowing for fading memories, there is a good deal of misinformation being thrown around about what actually happened in 1987. “Senate Democrats and a few Republicans united to filibuster the nomination,” according to a recent story in the conservative Washington Examiner. Not so. It was as far from a filibuster as is possible to imagine. Despite having voted 9 to 5 to reject the nomination, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent Judge Bork's name to the Senate floor for an up-or-down vote, which the White House and the nominee insisted on. The vote was 58 to 42 to reject the nomination. There was never the hint of a filibuster.

The confirmation hearing itself, presided over by Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a senator and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, lasted for a spellbinding week. The senators questioned Judge Bork extensively about his academic writing, his speeches and his opinions for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to which President Reagan had appointed him (along with Antonin Scalia) as a justice-in-waiting. Judge Bork answered their questions, at length. His problem wasn't that he didn't get a chance to explain himself. It was that a majority of the Senate, including six Republicans who voted against him, didn't like what he said.