Kaus: They Borked a Guilty Man
However I do remember the vile charges leveled against him on the Senate floor, especially those by the hypocritical sleazeball Ted Kennedy, who took what I thought were reasonable and conscientious doubts on Bork's positions and blew them into hyperbolic fear mongering. Setting a pattern that the Democratic party follows to this day and establishing the partisan poison we now see from both sides.
And now.. without Bork... we have police breaking down citizen's doors in the dead of night and proposed censure of ideas by which politicians?
So Kennedy was successful in keeping someone who should not have been on the Court from being confirmed. But I think, and many agree, we lost something in the process.
Note that Kaus above also blows up a hypocritical and hysterical damnation of Bork by another leftist.
Should he have been confirmed, no.. not because of those former views by themselves but that he was evidently pliant in applying them. We need to know who we are getting.
Note this tribute:
OLSON: Remembering a great American
Judge Bork’s arguments as solicitor general before the Supreme Court were models of brilliant, erudite, persuasive advocacy. His judicial opinions were insightful and perceptive. His commentaries on culture, society and morals were provocative and learned. His writing was elegant and eloquent, witty and memorable.
Judge Bork was politically attacked not because his qualifications fell short but because his viewpoints and scholarship were abhorrent to the left and precisely because he was such a brilliant, persuasive and effective advocate and such a towering intellect. His enemies could not stand to see him on the Supreme Court.
In there are exactly both sides of the story. Bork was able to chain constitutional precepts in creative ways. It's why he was viciously and unnecessarily made out to be the devil, and why he should not have been on the court.
