When Mitt Romney announced last month that his campaign’s legal team would be led by rejected Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, we were somewhat aghast. Bork’s legal record was so extreme – he opposed the Civil Rights Act and the right to birth control, for instance – that his 1987 Supreme Court nomination was rejected by the Senate. And his views have hardly tempered since then – a 2002 PFAW report checked back in on Bork’s crusades against pop culture, freedom of expression and gay rights.
But Robert Bork isn’t the only blast from the past who Romney has brought in to help develop his policies. Today, the former Massachusetts governor announced his economic team – which unsurprisingly includes two prominent economic advisors to George W. Bush, including one of the primary architects of the disastrous 2003 Bush tax cuts.
Two of the four members of Romney’s econ team are former Bush advisers – R. Glenn Hubbard, who was the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2001 to 2003, and N. Gregory Mankiw, who took over from 2003 to 2005. Hubbard helped devise the tax cuts for the wealthy that were the largest contributor to the ballooning budget deficit under Bush, and which Republicans in Congress still refuse to roll back. Mankiw helped Bush with his plan to privatize Social Security and praised the benefits of outsourcing labor.
Mitt Romney is getting something of a free pass in the current GOP field, but his choice of advisors shows just how extreme he really is. The last thing we need is more economic policies like Bush’s or judges like Bork, but under Romney it seems that’s exactly what we’d get.