I have to admit that when I saw the headline “The Ugliness Started with Bork” over an op-ed column by Joe Nocera in The New York Times, I reckoned it would be yet another chapter in the long-running left-liberal campaign to demonize the great jurist Robert H. Bork. I was wrong. Today — October 23 — is the 24th anniversary of the Senate’s shameful vote against Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Nocera wrote, if not to apologize, exactly, then at least to acknowledge that the poisonous campaign to discredit Bork — unprecedented in its nastiness — was “the beginning of the end of civil discourse in politics.”
That’s probably correct. And while politics by its very nature is a partisan business that elicits strong emotions, and strong rhetoric to match, the campaign against Judge Bork was unparalleled in its ferocity and — something Nocera touches upon but gingerly — patent mendacity. Supreme Court nominees had been voted down before (and since). But had any previous candidate with what Nocera right calls Bork’s scholarly “pedigree” and “intellectual fire power” ever been voted down? After all, at the time he was tapped by Reagan, Bork had been a professor of law at Yale, former solicitor general of the United States, and a federal appeals court judge. He was — and is — also a prominent and articulate legal scholar, arguing forcefully for the doctrine of “original intent,” i.e., that a judge’s primary task is to discern the law in the light of the Constitution.
Democrats, as Nocera acknowledges, recognized that were they to follow the usual Senate procedure in reviewing Bork’s nomination, he would almost certainly have been appointed to the Supreme Court. Instead, they knowingly endeavored to besmirch his reputation and record, portraying him not as a serious and thoughtful legal scholar (which he was), but as “a right-wing loony.” Nocera recalls an ad that “claimed, absurdly, that Bork wanted to give ‘women workers the choice between sterilization and their job.’” But that was just business as usual for the hyenas — including many at The New York Times — who poured through Judge Bork’s trash and movie rental receipts in the hope of discovering something embarrassing.
Never forget that had we gotten Judge Bork, we would not have Anthony Kennedy.
Judge Bork was emminently more qualified and most importantly, had a profound respect for constitutional integrity.
Conversely, Anthony Kennedy is supremely more interrested in being “the swing vote” and the center of attention.
Just think of all of the 5-4 decisions that would have gone the other way.
It disgusts me that a majority of those currently seated do not hold the social contract as binding as originally constructed and instead supplant their notions under the guise of ” a living and breathing” constitution.
They violate their oaths routinely with no consequence.
Bork is a mental giant who would have left a lasting mark on the court. A real shame he was “Borked”. Bork with Ginsburg, breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan would be like a learned professor (good conservative variety) in the company of pre-schoolers.
Thank you for the reminder Roger. I was in my early 30′s and the Bork nomination fight was my wake up call to the malignancy of the left. That episode made it clear to me that there were no rules for the left, other than the one that says ‘we win, no matter what the cost’. And here we are, a quarter century down the road and in the middle of a ‘cold’ civil war with the OWS lunatics playing with matches on a keg of dynamite, encouraged by no less than the ruling apparatus of the Democrat Party. And it truly is a keg of dynamite because it is foolish in the extreme for any one side to think that they can dispense with civil discourse and completely shut down the other side. To think that the other side will go quietly into the night because of fear of being called names. No, the left will get its comeuppance and will have no one to blame but itself because when you make a science of acting like spoiled, screaming, lying, bratty children, the adults will eventually lose their patience and give you the spanking you’ve been begging for. And our patience is rapidly coming to an end.
Much of what you say is the unvarnished truth, but it is not the whole truth. Bork is a committed, inveterate statist, one who is not an originalist, only an originalist for the purposes of interpreting the parts of the constitution with which he agrees.
We dodged a bullet when he was rejected.
The 9th, 10th, and 14th amendments are all in the constitution and on an equal basis of having force as any other word in it. They and all the other words in it are the basis of the presumption of liberty which is a guidon for any legitimately, honestly undertaken task of constitutional interpretation.
There is not one inkblot on it, except what the faint-hearted orginalists see.
For the benefit of us knuckledraggers, please cite anything supporting your absurd and fabricated speculations.
Have to agree with Blotto on this one, unless Tom Perkins can cite one piece of real evidence to support his claim I will be of the opinion that he is a liar and only interested in furthering the leftist agenda.
I am heartened by the civility and presumption of good faith in the comments found in this haven of conservatives! Some additional thoughts:
Bork’s blot: http://books.google.com/books?id=_FZuIpQak9kC&pg=PA234&lpg=PA234&dq=blot+ninth+bork&source=bl&ots=Pxb-RHWd9z&sig=DlUICI6BK-Z9FoetzdVJW9yKfSI&hl=en&ei=UDemTua9LeGViQKysozJDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CDoQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=blot%20ninth%20bork&f=false
Robt. Bork on the State and censorship: http://reason.com/blog/2005/12/05/censors-for-freedom
I recommend checking out Judge Bork’s divers specific prescriptions for what ails us.
In his 1996 book Slouching Towards Gomorrah Bork writes that…
“The Second Amendment was designed to allow states to defend themselves against a possibly tyrannical national government. Now that the federal government has stealth bombers and nuclear weapons, it is hard to imagine what people would need to keep in the garage to serve that purpose.”
Perhaps if Judge Bork had found himself besieged by gangs in post-Katrina New Orleans, he might have gained a healthy appreciation for the utility of SKS rifles and AR-15s in modern life. How much more would he have appreciated such hardware, had he found himself surveying the smoking ruins of an American city flattened by nuclear terror attack, devoid of police and swarming with brigands.
But Judge Bork is one of those men who cannot “imagine” what he has not personally experienced. And so the “brilliant” jurist discarded James Madison’s handiwork as casually as he would a soiled Kleenex.
Tom knew exactly what he was talking about and the rest of you have been drinking the koolaid. And Kennedy got Heller and McDonald right.
Bork claimed not to know the meaning of the Ninth Amendment and that therefore it had no meaning. That alone made him unfit to serve. This amendment, if properly understood, is a firewall against claims that the government bestows rights on us rather than that it must prove we are NOT entitled to freedom in countless unnamed areas before it can abridge those freedoms.
The amendment implies we are deserving of freedom unless proven NOT to be, as opposed to our deserving NOT to have freedom unless the government says we should have it. This is the same kind of difference as in a court of law the defendant being presumed innocent rather than presumed guilty. The difference is profound.
Tom Perkins is right.
There are two Leftist ideologies. One, socialism, beleives that Human Nature does not exist, that man has no instincts, and that manipulating man’s environment can change basic behaviors. Then there are Libertarians, who believe the Human Nature does not exist, that man has no innate instincts, and that man can live as a solitary animal outside of natural human society. But humans have an innate, inherited Human Nature, which cannot be altered by changing the environment, and man is a social animal, incapable of existing outside of human society, with it’s prescriptions, religions, mores, habits, rules of behavior, and mutual duties and reciprocal rights. Ron Paul is every bit as crazy as Lenin or Trotsky.
Between “leftist” & “libertarian”, I don’t think you know what at least one of those words means.
So now that other people have posted links to the invidious nature of Bork’s jurisprudence, I wonder if either Blotto or Chris in California, or Archie or Kimball for that matter, can admit or address the significance and nature of Bork’s shortcomings?
Can they say what is true–the manner of Bork’s rejection from the court was atrocious, the fact of it was good luck for America and the constitution.
No matter that Bork was not another perfect human being, he was then and is now much more qualified to sit on the court than the left wing lap dogs that make the gang of four.
Those four are not judges but mearly lapdogs of the communist/progressive/liberal/demoRATic party that is trying to destroy this nation.With the current illegal occupant of the whitehouse one more left winger and this country is finished as a free nation.
We should be grateful for Nocera’s decency in writing this column no matter what caveats can be discerned. Can you imagine Krugman or Rich writing something like this.
That was the day when the marxist ruling class first played their trump card, or rather slammed the trump card down on the table with a full-throated roar.
The trump card, of course, is the media, the institution that marxists infiltrated and took over decades before and had owned and controlled since.
Bork was the first time that the Ruling Class openly lied about a major event in this country, abetted by the sure knowledge that their partners, the media, would cover up for them at full throttle.
Spin the dial forward 21 years, and you get Barack Obama.
The fact that a tool at the Slimes now admits the Bork scam might be more significant than we think. What revelation is next? Have the masterfully arrogant overseers of the most corrupt organization in American Journolism decided that their boy in the white house has failed in the level of transformation he has been able to induce and is now primed to shatter the whole evil scheme?
Probably not, but it’s nice to dream.
One thing we on the right must never do, and that is whinge. That’s what lefties do. We take our defeats like grown-ups and use them to learn.
All this crap I hear form American right-wingers ahbout the media is really annoying. Don’t complain about the left-wing bias of the media, just overcome it! All over the World the left wing networks and newspapers are dying because they are boring and can’t keep the ionterest of the social A and B classes which trend conservative in all countries.
We on the right cocnstitute the best people in our societies. Yet by whining and by giving in to the media we look like wimps and little hot house flowers.
The most disgusting fact from this whole episode was Ted Kennedy leading the charge as the MORAL ARBITER of the Senate. The drunken, womanizing, lecherous, murdering whore monger was the avatar of morality who smeared and slandered a brilliant man. Ted Kennedy was a suppurating pustule who NEVER should have set one foot in the halls of Congress and his legacy has contaminated and debauched politics ever since. I cheered when he finally bit the dust.
America is adamant on maintaining its right to murder infants, all politics is subsumed under this horrible fact. The Bork hearings were a seminal event in opening the eyes of good people to the horror that America had become since Roe Vs. Wade. Now America is near the end of her lifecycle, as an influential empire.
The only congressional committee hearing I ever followed from start to finish. I even ordered the complete transcript.
The most idiotic comment to emerge from this event was the NYT editorial judgment that the exchanges between Bork and Arlen Specter were an intellectual clash of the highest order.
It was a struggle between an intellectual hurricane and a dust-bunny. There was a front-page story that included an account of the reaction of a bunch of law students at Yale. They were distressed by the legal, rather than “human,” tone of the debate. It was easy to see why they wished to get escape from thought into the realm of feeling.
The rules of civility were always followed a bit loosely, but jump 20 years later and we get those who had become so accustomed to it that they had no compunction about specuating aloud that perhaps John Roberts’ son was gay – before they realized he was four years old. Then it morphed into John Roberts himself being gay.
I listened to the entire hearing on the radio. Judge Bork’s testimony was the clearest exposition of constitutional law I’ve ever encountered. Nonetheless a Senator from the deep south voted against him because , he claimed, Bork looked odd and thus was “out of the mainstream”. His rejection was a national disgrace. The judge who it really brought to us was Souter, nominated solely because his views, left wing to the core, were obscure
On the Obamacare decision, I believe Chief Justice Roberts, not Justice Kennedy, will be the swing vote. I expect Justices, Kennedy, Alito, Scalia and Thomas will reject Obamacare. I am not sure Chief Justice Roberts will. On a previous commerce clause case, he voted with the four liberals. If Obamacare is upheld, what is to keep a bank-friendly Congress from requiring that Americans have at least one credit card, with penalties for any American who does not have a credit card?
Concerning Bork — he was not confirmed by the Senate because Republicans did not control the Senate and President Reagan did not fight for him. Senator Kennedy’s diatribe was issued as soon as the nomination was announced. There was no denunciation from the administration — or from any prominent Republicans, if my memory is accurate — of Senator Kennedy’s mean-spirited comments.
Perhaps the political antecedents of the Bork nomination go back to the Fortas situation, when Republicans and conservative Democrats (including Sen. Ervin, later a lib icon via the Senate Watergate hearing that he chaired), in the context of the retirement of Chief Justice Warren prevented Fortas from succeeding Warren and eventually forced Fortas off the court. The Democrats got even by denying Nixon’s nominations of Judges Haynsworth and Carswell. There, too, the GOP did not have a Senate majority.
Finley Peter Dunne famously pointed out, through his “Mr. Dooley,” that the Supreme Court follows the election returns. Apparently, the results on Senate elections are a function of “Mr. Dooley’s” observation. Moral for the GOP — whatever happens in the 2012 presidsential election, it is advisable to get a principled GOP majority in the Senate (allowing that 41 Republicans who stand together can filibuster an Obama nomination).
Back to Bork — I think the expectation was that the nominee would dazzle the the Judiciary Committee with his brilliance. Didn’t happen. Indeed, I recall that Sen. Heflin (D. Ala.) suggested that Judge Bork’s bearded appearance had a weird aspect. Hell hath no fury greater than a liberal zealot intent on blocking a Supreme Court nominee deemed hostile to left-wing result-oriented jurisprudence.
proreason;
the marxist media actually came out in the open on Feb 3, 1968 in Saigon when an AP photographer circulated the photo of the Chief of National Police executing a communist mass murderer and purposely ID’d the killer as a Vietcong “soldier.” The VC killer had murdered multiple National Police officers and their unarmed families in a mass grave and had escaped the National Police several times before being recaptured. The Chief knew the officers whom the communist killer had murdered as well as the family members murdered by the same communist killer.
US editors,fully aware of mass murderer’s history, purposely used the Saigon photo to support anti-war sentiment. The media marxists came after Judge Bork with a vengeance honed by 19 years of commie coddling which began in Saigon in 1968.
Lastly, Judge Bork graduated from college when he was 16, in 1944. The future jurist enlisted in the US Marines shortly thereafter and fought in the Pacific as an infantrymen. After the war Judge Bork returned home, went to law schoolw school and volunteered for Marine duty as a military attorney because he didn’t feel it was right for someone with the gifts he had to get by without serving his country.
The Kennedy assault on Judge Bork is well-documented. The diving hero of Chappaquiddick was partying with three other fortyish, married Irish democrat lawyers and their twenty-something single concubines when the drunken Senator from Massachusetts killed his girl friend for the night, Mary Jo Kopechne in a watery grave off Chappaquiddick Bridge in July, 1969.
Tom; Well written and so to the point. Kennedy was a drunken (rich) lout whose father paid for the justice rendered. No justice. I spent many of my working years as a traffic officer. I investigated fatal accident for prosecution. I attended an advanced class in traffic accident investigation at a well know university in the Ill are. The PhD had been hired to investigate the accident and was only able to state don’t ride with ted Kennedy.
I have not seen or heard, even obliquely, that Bork got in trouble during the “Saterday Night Massacre” when Nixon went doww the list at Justice and found his henchman in Bork. Why is it never cited, from Left or Right, in the bitter argument that never ends?
Nocera chronicaled the beginning of the end. Bork, indeed, a giant brought down by the likes of a cowardly Ted Kennedy and his ilk.
I was in my early years of college during this. I was out of the country (and therefore out of touch) when the actual hearings were going on.
I came back to the U.S. in the aftermath. Curious as to what the fuss was about, I read Bork’s book. The thoughtful wisdom with which he wrote was in complete conflict with the way he had been portrayed in those hearings.
That led me to a few simple questions. First, how could the Democrats have been so wrong about who he was? Why? What agendas were they trying to protect? And what did it say about a political party that they could be that vicious and deceitful? If truth mattered so little to them, then how could they be trusted?
The implications of those questions were a watershed for me. It was probably the specific moment that I began my transformation from a moderate Democrat college kid to the patriot/revolutionary that I am now.
LGoPs, I can relate to your perspective, I’m just one decade younger.
Kennedy lied, but telling the truth might have prevented Bork from getting on the court. Bork was a “judicial conservative,” but he wasn’t much of a conservative, which today is the equivalent of “classical liberal.” He thought that the 9th Amendment was an inkblot, and believed in deference to Congress, even when constitutional rights were at stake. He would have joined the majority in Kelo, for example.