Free Republic

Last week Judge Reggie Walton sentenced Scooter Libby to 30 months in the federal penitentiary for allegedly lying about a crime that never occurred and didn't exist. While everything about the case qualifies as script material for The Twilight Zone, acknowledging plot contributions from both Kafka and Heller, the newer developments owe more to One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. *** What is newly very apparent is the personal animus that Judge Walton has displayed towards those who have sprung to Libby's defense. *** Judge Walton's order allowing the 12 to file their brief was short, formulaic, curt. It contained...

Robert H. Bork (1927-    ): American jurist, Yale law professor, U.S. Solicitor General (1973-77), judge for federal Circuit Court of Appeals for D.C. (1982-88), Supreme Court nominee, resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute; converted in 2003 from Protestant background Robert Bork, the Culture War, and the Catholic Church Judge Robert Bork, a conservative legal and judicial champion well-known to American readers, was received into the Catholic Church on July 21, 2003, at age 76. Most readers will remember Judge Bork because of his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1987. An outspoken conservative, Bork was...

NOTE: I believe that one of the many reasons the Dems won last night was because of the President's failure to stand up and fight them. And the GOP senate failed to fight them. No decent judge is going to be confirmed in the next two years. Bush could show that he is not going to kowtow by nominating good solid judges who believe in the Constitution and, if the Dems fail to confirm qualified judges, he needs to recess appoint. Can you imagine how the conservative base would stand up and cheer if Robert Bork went to the bench...

Justice Scalia’s argument about the death penalty has two aspects. The first concerns the duty of the judge; the second has to do with the respect owed by Catholics to the Pope’s call for the virtual abolition of the penalty in Evangelium Vitae. As to the first, the duty of the judge, there can, it seems to me, be no reasonable disagreement. The Constitution several times explicitly recognizes capital punishment, leaving legislatures free to choose or reject that sanction. Most American legislatures have chosen it. By what warrant, then, can a Justice of the Supreme Court abolish what the Constitution...

How liberals are using international law to promote their agenda and create a boomerang effect in the United States:  By creating novel new international laws, the New Class hopes to outflank American legislatures and courts by having liberal views adopted abroad (by foreign governments and organizations such as the United Nations) and then imposed on the United States.This approach is working. These new laws boomerang back to the United States; courts now cite the decisions of foreign courts in “interpreting” our Constitution.  Radical decisions on social issues, values, religion, and speech that are made by foreign legislatures and courts...

It ought to be a major intellectual event in constitutional law when a Justice of the Supreme Court comes forward publicly to explain his theory of judging. Explanation is needed, for by now nobody familiar with the work of the Court believes it confines its rulings to the principles of the historic Constitution. There have always been instances when the Court voted its sympathies rather than anything resembling the Constitution, but over the last half century the divergence between the document and the decisions has sharply increased. Indeed, the criticism that the Court routinely departs from the Constitution’s principles, as...

Democrats — at least those seeking the Democratic nomination for president and those who are desperate for money from extremist Left deep pockets — are trying to "out-Liberal" each other on the Alito nomination, even when it is clear a bipartisan majority of senators intend to make the Judge Alito "Justice Alito" in just a few days. John Kerry, after launching the first international filibuster from the slopes of the Swiss Alps with the help of Ted Kennedy, gave a speech earlier on the Senate floor that rivals Kennedy’s 1987 smear of Judge Bork. Kennedy claimed that in “Judge Bork’s...

With at least 52 Senators already on record in support, it's clear that--short of some smear ex machina--liberal Democrats can't stop Samuel Alito from being confirmed to a seat on the Supreme Court. So it's a good moment to consider what this says about our politics and what it means for the Court as it enters a new era. One conclusion is that the confirmation of both Chief Justice John Roberts and Judge Alito marks the most important domestic success for President Bush since his 2003 tax cuts. These look like legacy picks. Despite the Harriet Miers misstep, Mr. Bush...

A year after Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination was scuttled by the Senate, federal prosecutor Samuel Alito called Bork "one of the most outstanding nominees of the century.'' Eighteen years later, the comment must have seemed like a godsend to Democrats hoping to paint Alito as a reactionary unsuited for the high court. But when a senator confronted him with his words, Alito said he had only been expressing admiration for Bork, and loyalty to the administration that appointed them both. He insisted he wasn't endorsing Bork's views on topics such as abortion, voting rights and presidential power. It was...

With the battle over the nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court set to take center stage on Monday, the American people have undoubtedly become familiar in past weeks with his critics -- along with their criticisms, attacks and mischaracterizations. If the best predictor of future behavior is past performance, then it is reasonable to expect that a host of rather predictable, knee-jerk criticisms -- which have already been refuted with fact -- will be leveled against this fine nominee in a misguided effort to discredit his qualifications. As a preview of the coming debate, here...

The lesson of Reagan's nominee is: Say just as little as you possibly canMedia critic Danny Schechter was referring to television when he titled one of his books "The More You Watch, the Less You Know.'' But he just as well might have been describing the trend in Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Consider Robert Bork, President Ronald Reagan's nominee for a seat on the court in 1987, and the last nominee to be defeated on the Senate floor. There's still bitterness among Bork's supporters -- who coined the term "Borking'' for the destruction of a Supreme Court candidacy -- but...

The following is an email that I received from a friend regarding Judge Robert Bork's letter to the Wall Street Journal... "Eric Felten's essay on the dry martini is itself near-perfect ('Don't Forget the Vermouth,' Leisure & Arts, Pursuits, Dec. 10). His allusion to constitutional jurisprudence is faulty, however, since neither in law nor martinis can we know the subjective 'original intent' of the Founding Fathers. As to martinis, the intent may have been to ease man's passage through this vale of tears or, less admirably, to employ the tactic of 'candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.' What counts...

It is premature to pronounce the job completed, but with the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals for a seat on the Supreme Court, George Bush has substantially narrowed the rift with his conservative base he created with his nomination of Harriet Miers. Ms. Miers, a woman of many fine qualities, was perceived as simply lacking the constitutional sophistication to withstand the pressures of a liberal Court majority and its allies in the academy and the media sufficiently to help bring the Court back from its self-assumed role as a political rather than...

Ten days ago I wrote about the Miers nomination in light of Judge Bork's introduction to a new book of essays on SCOTUS. In this morning's Wall Street Journal, Judge Bork weighs in with a denunciation of the Miers nomination, which includes the fairly astonishing sentence: The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq aside, George W. Bush has not governed as a conservative (amnesty for illegal immigrants, reckless spending that will ultimately undo his tax cuts, signing a campaign finance bill even while maintaining its unconstitutionality). This is the same as arguing that "Except for opposing Hitler and later warning of...

Is "miered" the new "borked"? Robert Bork's failed nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987 spawned the verb "borked," defined loosely as getting rejected in an unseemly, even unfair, manner. Now there is talk online about whether Harriet Miers' withdrawal of her nomination to the high court will give rise to the term "miered." While liberals led to the opposition to Bork, it was conservatives who brought down Miers' nomination. A contributor to The Reform Club, a right-leaning blog, wrote that to get "borked" was "to be unscrupulously torpedoed by an opponent," while to get "miered" was to be "unscrupulously...

Operation Rescue renews its call for Miers’ withdrawalWashington, DC – The highly esteemed Judge Robert Bork weighed in yesterday on the controversial Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers. Miers has been under scrutiny in the past week for having no paper trail or judicial experience.Former Federal Judge Robert Bork, whose nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by the Senate in an historically contentious battle in 1987, described the choice of Miers as “a disaster on every level.”Bork, considered the perhaps finest intellectual mind in the legal community, joins a growing number of conservatives expressing concern over the Miers nomination and...

"I am convinced, as I think almost all constitutional scholars are, that Roe v. Wade is an unconstitutional decision, a serious and wholly unjustifiable judicial usurpation of state legislative authority. I also think that Roe v. Wade is by no means the only example of such unconstitutional behavior by the Supreme Court." This bit of public truth-telling was committed by Robert Bork, then a professor at Yale Law School, when he testified before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on June 1, 1981. Ironically, Bork made this statement about Roe in the midst of testimony in which he explained why he opposed...

TO BORK VS. TO MIER [Kathryn Jean Lopez] Yesterday on air Hugh Hewitt suggested to me that we here were trying to Bork Miers. No. This is new SCOTUS verb time. Andrew Breitbart just came up with over IM: to MIER: to put your own allies in the most untenable position possible based upon exceptionally bad decsion making. Secondary defintion: While steadlily going in reverse in the driveway of your own home, intentionally abruptly pressing gas pedal as to crash into garage door for no apparent reason. They'll be teaching this in AP Government classes before long. Posted at 02:26...

RE: OUCH [Rod Dreher] But Kathryn, I fully expect that if Justice Stevens retires, President Bush will nominate his dog Barney to fill that vacant seat. After all, who can a man trust to be loyal more than his dog? I reckon the president knows Barney's heart as well as anybody's, and certainly Barney has no paper trail, unless you count stuff he chewed up when he was a puppy. Besides, if Caligula can put his horse in the Senate... Posted at 06:16 PM http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_02_corner-archive.asp#078596

Some afternoon observations on Miers and "Borking." October 12, 2005 12:45 PM PST The verb "to Bork" has an origin in the 1987 treatment of Robert Bork by his opponents on the left. It was a dishonorable episode in American political history. From Wikipedia: According to the New York Times, the verb to bork might be defined as "to destroy a judicial nominee through a concerted attack on his character, background and philosophy." [1] The most famous (or infamous) use of the verb to bork occurred in July 1991 at a conference of the National Organization for Women in New...