Joe Nocera, writing in the New York Times, 'gets it': the straight-line reason why we have such a great divide between the Republicans and the Leftists. It all started 24 years ago today; when Democrats culminated what was a no-holds-barred attack on Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan's most excellent nominee to the Supreme Court.
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| Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork |
On Oct. 23, 1987 — 24 years ago on Sunday — Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court was voted down by the Senate. All but two Democrats voted “nay.”
The rejection of a Supreme Court nominee is unusual but not unheard of (see Clement Haynsworth Jr.). But rarely has a failed nominee had the pedigree — and intellectual firepower — of Bork. He had been a law professor at Yale, the solicitor general of the United States and, at the time Ronald Reagan tapped him for the court, a federal appeals court judge.
Moreover, Bork was a legal intellectual, a proponent of original intent and judicial restraint. The task of the judge, he once wrote, is “to discern how the framers’ values, defined in the context of the world they knew, apply to the world we know.” He said that Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, was a “wholly unjustifiable judicial usurpation” of authority that belonged to the states, that the court’s recent rulings on affirmative action were problematic and that the First Amendment didn’t apply to pornography.
Whatever you think of these views, they cannot be fairly characterized as extreme; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, among many others, has questioned the rationale offered by the court to justify Roe v. Wade. Nor was Bork himself an extremist. He was a strongly opinionated, somewhat pugnacious, deeply conservative judge. (At 84 today, he hasn’t mellowed much either, to judge from an interview he recently gave Newsweek.)
I bring up Bork not only because Sunday is a convenient anniversary. His nomination battle is also a reminder that our poisoned politics is not just about Republicans behaving badly, as many Democrats and their liberal allies have convinced themselves. Democrats can be — and have been — every bit as obstructionist, mean-spirited and unfair.
That is all correct.
Robert Bork was a 'Good Man', an intellectual giant, and a proponent of Constitutional original intent, looking only to the meaning of the text's intent as written by the authors; not looking to redefine the text as left-Liberals have done, to re-frame the meaning for their ideological agenda. And, later, after the nomination of Robert Bork was scuttled, some of the Leftists admitted their wrongdoing...
But liberals couldn’t just come out and say that. “If this were carried out as an internal Senate debate,” Ann Lewis, the Democratic activist, would later acknowledge, “we would have deep and thoughtful discussions about the Constitution, and then we would lose.” So, instead, the Democrats sought to portray Bork as “a right-wing loony,” to use a phrase in a memo written by the Advocacy Institute, a liberal lobby group.
Liberals always lose when the Constitution is interpreted as intended, because this Republic was NOT conceived to become the Leftist Hell-Hole these pricks desire.
The character assassination began the day Bork was nominated, when Ted Kennedy gave a fiery speech describing “Robert Bork’s America” as a place “in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters,” and so on. It continued until the day the nomination was voted down; one ad, for instance, claimed, absurdly, that Bork wanted to give “women workers the choice between sterilization and their job.”
Conservatives were stunned by the relentlessness — and the essential unfairness — of the attacks. But the truth is that many of the liberals fighting the nomination also knew they were unfair. That same Advocacy Institute memo noted that, “Like it or not, Bork falls (perhaps barely) at the borderline of respectability.” It didn’t matter. He had to be portrayed “as an extreme ideological activist.” The ends were used to justify some truly despicable means.
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| Ted Kennedy and his 'Son' |
Ah yes, Ted (Mary Jo Kopechne) Kennedy, the 'Liberal Lion' of the Senate. May he rot in whatever place he finds himself. There's some good riddance.
Oh, an aside: the CLASS Act, that piece of ObamaCare that was scuttled last week? That was the brainchild of Ted Kennedy, with which he had a lifelong love affair. What a shame it could never succeed! but like most of these far-fetched Lefty goals, there's just no way they can be sustained in the 'real world'.
Nocera...
Today, of course, the court has a conservative majority, and liberal victories are, indeed, being overturned. Interestingly, Bolick says Bork’s beliefs would have made him a restraining force. Theodore Olson, who served as solicitor general under George W. Bush, also pointed out that after Bork, nominees would scarcely acknowledge that they had rich and nuanced judicial philosophies for fear of giving ammunition to the other side. Those philosophies would be unveiled only after they were on the court.
Mostly, though, the point remains this: The next time a liberal asks why Republicans are so intransigent, you might suggest that the answer lies in the mirror.
That's right, LeftLibProggs. Look in the damned mirror, you will see not only see the reason we fight you, but you'll see anything but a true defender of America's Constitution.
A comment from the NYT site, by a 'liberal'...
The Constitution is a great document, but the institutions it created are failing in modern world. Hopefully, we'll be able to reconsider the document peacefully, and make the necessary institutional changes.
You borked Robert Bork. Thanks for that, really, because you awakened a sleeping giant that, once mobilized, will not allow your hostile takeover of this little Republic.
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