Thirty years after Robert Bork was denied a seat on the Supreme Court, his formidable legacy lives on.
As a stoical Robert Bork sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the morning of September 15, 1987, surrounded by reporters, klieg lights, and television cameras, the 60-year-old jurist could look back on an accomplished career.
For five and a half years, he had served on the D.C. Circuit, considered the nation’s most prestigious court other than the U.S. Supreme Court. Bork had also been a marine, a successful antitrust litigator, a law professor, solicitor general, and acting attorney general of the United States.
But as he faced committee chairman Joe Biden and his hostile Democratic colleagues, including Ted Kennedy, Howard Metzenbaum, Robert Byrd, Patrick Leahy, and Paul Simon, the cerebral Bork was ill-suited—and disinclined—to duplicate the dramatic performance given in the same hearing room a few months earlier, when the telegenic Lt. Col. Oliver North parried with a joint congressional committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair.
Against the urging of his handlers, and with his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan hanging in the balance, Bork made no attempt to emulate North, believing that such rhetorical flair was undignified for a judge.
Instead, during an unprecedented five days of grilling, Bork chose to
answer the committee’s questions “matter-of-factly” and to explain his
view of judging “fully.” The media coverage, featuring the judge’s
lengthy, dispassionate responses, failed to rally the American public in
his favor, unlike North’s gripping testimony. Ultimately, despite
Bork’s stellar credentials, the Senate voted him down, largely on party
grounds—an outcome that coined the now-ubiquitous term “borking.”..........To Read More.....
I'm old enough to remember the Bork hearings and the outrageous things said by these leftist misfits. Kennedy's evaluation of this extremely accomplished man? He actually said - and get this - Bork was too extreme for the Supreme Court.
Not a one of those sewer trout ever accomplished a fraction of what Bork did in his life. Especially Kennedy, who had already murdered Mary Jo Kopechne 18 years before, but in the eyes of Kennedy and the rest of those misfits in Congress, Kennedy being a drunk and a murderer wasn't too extreme to serve in the Senate, or to sit in judgement of a man whose shoes he wasn't fit to shine.
