Maybe I don’t travel in conservative circles enough, but I had no idea that the right looks lack on the failed 1987 nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court as an example of right-wing martyrdom. Apparently, it’s the case.
To the right, “Borking” has become a verb to describe a practice whereby ideologically-rigid Dems smear a perfectly qualified judicial nominee who isn’t liberal enough. Under this notion, a Republican president sends a capable jurist to the Senate, but Dems proceed to ask all kinds of unfair and inappropriate political questions as part of a coordinated attack. Indeed, the fight over Bork’s nomination is evidently considered by today’s right-wing activists as the start of a baleful period of ideological conflict.
Looking over Media Matters reports from the last week (since O’Connor’s announced retirement), Bork’s name has come up again and again in this context in the national media. I had no idea Bork had become such a martyr.
Thankfully, we have Jon Chait to set the record straight and explain why all of this hand-wringing is terribly silly.
The funny thing is that the memory of the campaign to demonize Bork as a right-wing nut has grown stronger even as the intervening years have shown quite clearly that Bork is, in fact, a right-wing nut.
The most famous hyperbolic charge against Bork — one which has been invoked far more often against Bork’s accusers than it ever was against Bork — was Sen. Ted Kennedy’s claim that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters,” etc., etc.
This was far from the sort of fair summation of the totality of Bork’s legal philosophy that you might find at a law school seminar. But it wasn’t exactly false either. Bork had criticized the portion of the Civil Rights Act banning discrimination in public accommodations, argued against extending the equal protection of the 14th Amendment to women, took an extremely restrictive view of free speech, and so on.
And that was before his nomination. After the Senate rejected his nomination, Bork really let loose.
He has raged that one Supreme Court decision comes “close to accepting foreign control of the American Constitution.” He has defended conservatives threatening budgetary reprisals against the judiciary, which even the right wing of the GOP has denounced.
Bork called President Clinton, among other things, a “sociopath,” and insisted that, “given power, the sociopath will display totalitarian tendencies. Clinton does.” He predicted that if Al Gore won the presidency “moral disapproval of homosexual conduct would be outlawed in any public and many private contexts.” (Apparently, Gore’s America is a land in which Rick Santorum and Tom Coburn would languish in prison, and no one could utter the word “homo” without fearing the knock of the police upon his door.) Even George W. Bush criticized Bork’s cultural hysteria in 1999 — one of the few times Bush has distanced himself from a fellow conservative.
As his nomination is now remembered, Bork lost only because of the viciousness of his opponents and the slow-footedness of his defenders. (Bork’s beard, which gave him a passing resemblance to Ming the Merciless, probably didn’t help either.) The truth is that although the attacks on him were over-simplistic, his rejection was the right outcome.
Of course it was. This guy might fit in well on Fox News, or offering red meat to Limbaugh, but the last place Bork belonged was on the highest court in the land.
The “Borking” verb, if anything, should refer to “exposing a judicial nominee as a lunatic.”