The issue then was not Boyle's record. Rather, he got caught up in the ill will generated by the Senate's just-concluded battle over Bush's nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.
The White House, angry that Anita Hill's allegations against Thomas had leaked, withheld FBI background reports on its judicial nominees from the Judiciary Committee, which was then under Democratic control.
The chairman, Sen. Joseph R. Biden (D-Del.) responded by refusing to move Bush's judicial nominees forward. The dispute was not ironed out until early 1992. Biden and then-Attorney General William P. Barr made a deal for Senate confirmation of some Bush nominees.
But Boyle's turn never came; he did not get a hearing, and his nomination died after Bush's defeat.
The new president, Bill Clinton, set out to put the first black judge on the 4th Circuit, the court of last resort for federal cases in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and the Carolinas, except for the handful that make it to the Supreme Court.
But Helms blamed Biden for Boyle's defeat. Under Senate procedures, he had the power to block any nominee from his home state. Publicly declaring his intention to respond to what he called the "mistreatment of our nominee by the Democrats," Helms prevented four Clinton nominees from North Carolina -- James A. Beaty Jr., Rich Leonard, James A. Wynn Jr. and Elizabeth Gibson -- from receiving hearings. Beaty and Wynn are black.
Later, Helms objected to Clinton's black nominee from Virginia, Roger Gregory, saying that the 4th Circuit, which was down to 10 of its allotted 15 judgeships at the time, did not need any new judges.
In the meantime, Boyle continued to serve on the district court for eastern North Carolina.
During the 1990s, he angered Democrats and civil rights activists by ruling, as a member of a three-judge panel, that the formation of the heavily black 12th Congressional District in North Carolina was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The district was eventually upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court on a 5 to 4 vote.
Those rulings earned Boyle the undying disapproval of the 12th District's Rep. Melvin Watt (D), now a leading opponent of his nomination. Watt said in a recent letter to the Judiciary Committee: "His rulings show this judge to be especially determined to defy both the civil rights statutes enacted by the Congress and the court rulings on which they are based."
In 1996, Boyle refused to ratify a settlement worked out between North Carolina and the Clinton Justice Department that would have resulted in the hiring of more women as state prison guards.
"It is most emphatically not the purpose of federal law to impose a uniformity of cultural outcome upon the individual states," he wrote.
