{"id":18260,"date":"2012-12-20T10:14:25","date_gmt":"2012-12-20T15:14:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=18260"},"modified":"2012-12-20T10:16:01","modified_gmt":"2012-12-20T15:16:01","slug":"borking-in-retrospect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/12\/20\/borking-in-retrospect\/","title":{"rendered":"Borking, in retrospect"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nypost.com\/p\/news\/opinion\/opedcolumnists\/behind_the_smears_shhor1dvVp8trhcUbzbuAM?utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_content=Oped%20Columnists\" target=\"_blank\">Walter Olson<\/a> on the historically nasty confirmation battle that kept Robert Bork off the US Supreme Court:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Of course the confirmation critique that makes it into every Bork obituary isn\u2019t Heflin\u2019s or Johnston\u2019s. It\u2019s Ted Kennedy\u2019s blowhard caricature, intended for northern liberal consumption, of \u201cRobert Bork\u2019s America\u201d as \u201ca land in which women would be forced into back alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens\u2019 doors in midnight raids, school children could not be taught about evolution,\u201d and so on.<\/p>\n<p>Never in memory had a judicial nomination been fought in such language. Why?<\/p>\n<p>As a constitutional law scholar, Bork had distinguished himself even among conservatives for his scathing critique of the Warren Court, which he accused essentially of having made up constitutional law as it went along.<\/p>\n<p>To organized liberal groups, on whose behalf Kennedy was acting, this was the next thing to a declaration of war. Yet they couldn\u2019t exactly come out and defend making up constitutional law as you went along as their own vision for the high court.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, they served up a steady diet of vitriol and wild oversimplification, especially in TV ads and other messages delivered outside the confirmation hearings.<\/p>\n<p>The <em>Washington Post<\/em> itself opposed Bork\u2019s confirmation, yet nonetheless editorialized against the \u201cintellectual vulgarization and personal savagery\u201d to which some of his opponents had descended, \u201cprofoundly distorting the record and the nature of the man.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Walter Olson on the historically nasty confirmation battle that kept Robert Bork off the US Supreme Court: Of course the confirmation critique that makes it into every Bork obituary isn\u2019t Heflin\u2019s or Johnston\u2019s. It\u2019s Ted Kennedy\u2019s blowhard caricature, intended for northern liberal consumption, of \u201cRobert Bork\u2019s America\u201d as \u201ca land in which women would be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,7,9,13],"tags":[698,715,622,293,752],"class_list":["post-18260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-history","category-law","category-usa","tag-congress","tag-constitution","tag-ideology","tag-obituary","tag-supremecourt"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4Kw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18260"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18262,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18260\/revisions\/18262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}