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Elena Kagan thinks that the "Borking" of Robert Bork during his 1987 Supreme Court confirmation hearings would deserve a commemorative plate if the Franklin Mint launched a "great moments in legal history" dishware line. This isn't the time to rehearse the reasons why Kagan is wrong on that score. Still, one adverse result of the Bork hearings is worth dwelling on. Bork was the last Supreme Court nominee to give serious answers to serious questions. But because the left successfully anathematized him, no nominee since has dared show Borkian forthrightness. Consider Monday's high-court ruling: The Second Amendment right to own...

(CNSNews.com) – Former federal appellate judge and Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork said that Elena Kagan’s lacks the "mature philosophy of judging" needed to be a Supreme Court justice and that th Supreme Court is "drifting toward a committee of ideologues." In a Wednesday conference call sponsored by Americans United for Life, Judge Bork said that Kagan still displayed the tendencies of a young constitutional lawyer with “inflated dreams” of what constitutional law can and should accomplish.

Judge Robert Bork, whose nomination to the Supreme Court went down in flames in 1987 after contentious confirmation hearings, said for the first time today that he is opposed to Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Court. "Ms. Kagan has not had the time to develop a mature philosophy of judging," said Bork in a conference call organized by Americans United for Life. "It is typical of young lawyers going into constitutional law that they have inflated dreams of what constitutional law can do and what courts can do," Bork said. "That’s the danger of Ms. Kagan that she hasn’t had...

Justice Stevens says he will 'surely' retire during Obama's presidency By Jordan Fabian - 04/03/10 04:47 PM ET The usually reticent with the press Justice John Paul Stevens gave two major interviews this weekend that provide new information about if and when he will retire from the bench. Speculation has arisen that Stevens, 89, will step down sooner rather than later. The White House is preparing for confirmation proceedings over the summer, the New York Times wrote Saturday. In an interview with the Washington Post, Stevens, who is considered a member of the liberal wing of the Court, Stevens said...

Racists! That incendiary charge hurled by Democrats at Tea Party activists protesting against ObamaCare was shown to be totally false by Jack Cashill in his article "A Closer Look at the Capitol Steps Conspiracy". Given the Democratic Party's 150-year record of racist rhetoric and racial violence - from the days of slavery until today - it is astonishing to see Democrats sanctimoniously playing the race card.

Impeccable credentials are no defense against Republican obstruction tactics for Obama nominees waiting for U.S. Senate confirmation. The Republicans seem to be stalling the president's appointments simply because they can. They held up the nomination of Barbara Keenan, selected to become the first woman on the Virginia-based Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, even though there was no controversy about her qualifications, ideology or anything else - and the court was seriously shorthanded. Still, the nomination languished for months because of a GOP filibuster. She was ultimately confirmed, 99-0. These delay tactics go beyond the usual tit-for-tat when power shifts...

Counting the majority opinion and the various partial concurrences and dissents, today’s landmark First Amendment decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission clocks in a hefty 183-pages. But one thing that jumped right out while reading the dissent (it’s also a concurrence, in parts) written by Justice John Paul Stevens and joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor, is Stevens' angry tone. He calls the idea that the First Amendment forbids distinctions between individuals and individuals organized as a corporation “a glittering generality” with no foundation in the law, and later declares, “Under the majority's...

A legal advocacy group advised by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor in the 1980s actively opposed conservative Robert H. Bork's nomination to the high court calling him a "threat" to the "civil rights of the Latino community." The Senate went on to reject President Reagan's nominee in 1987. The revelation is included in 350 pages of documents the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund delivered to the senators late Tuesday evening. Judge Sotomayor worked for PRLDEF in various capacities from 1980 until she became a federal judge in 1992, spending most of her time as a board member. The...

August 28, 2009 Kennedy, Bork and the Politics of Judicial Destruction TOBIN HARSHAW The death of a public figure, especially a polarizing one, always makes things a bit dicey in opinionland. Do the detractors speak ill of the dead? Do the defenders pre-empt such criticisms, or does that just inspire the critics? In the case of Ted Kennedy, whose many accomplishments got due recognition everywhere, most chose to duck the fight on anything more problematic. There was comparatively little talk about a Harvard scandal, a very sad end to a first marriage or a controversial rape trial. Even among the...

The death of Senator Edward Kennedy from a malignant brain tumor superimposes somber intimations of mortality onto a frequently frivolous political scene. It puts us in mind us of what Wordsworth called the "fallings from us, vanishings" that ultimately reconcile us to our own mortality. As a young man Senator Kennedy became, as he is today, the pillar of a large extended family. We extend our sympathies to his family upon his death. Senator Kennedy became the lion of the Senate and of American liberalism. For better or worse, his legislative accomplishments have done much to shape the United States...

Senator Ted Kennedy has died.

Legal scholar and former U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork tells Newsmax he doesn't believe court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's assertion that she is "entirely governed by law," as he believes she should be. In an exclusive interview, he also said Sotomayor, who's going through confirmation hearings before a Senate panel, should be disqualified from consideration because of a statement she made. And Bork stated that the Roe v. Wade decision has been the "most dangerous" the Supreme Court has ever made because it has "embittered our politics." See Video: Judge Robert Bork discusses Sonia Sotomayor and the Senate hearings -...

WASHINGTON – A Puerto Rican civil rights organization advised by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor campaigned against seating conservative Robert Bork on the high court in the late 1980s, according to new documents that shed light on the group that's become a key focus of Republicans questioning Sotomayor's fitness to be a justice. The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund officially opposed GOP nominee Bork in 1987, "because of the threat he poses to the civil rights of the Latino community," its president reported in one of several documents from the group that the Senate Judiciary Committee released Wednesday....

Robert Bork says choosing Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court was 'a bad mistake.'Excerpt: His name has become a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary: if you've been blocked from appointment to public office, you've been "borked." Robert Bork was derailed in 1987 by a hostile Senate. Bork sat down with NEWSWEEK for a rare interview. Pres Obama has spoken of empathy as his key standard for choosing judicial nominees. What do you think of that approach? .......at a minimum it means you want a judge who will depart from the meaning of the constitution when a sympathetic case...

His name has become a verb, one so crisp and eloquent that it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary: if you've been blocked from appointment to public office, you've been "borked." The term's namesake is Robert Bork, whose path to the Supreme Court was derailed in 1987 by a hostile Senate. As Sonia Sotomayor braces for the same firing line, Bork, 82, sat down with NEWSWEEK for a rare interview. Excerpts: Was it your view that the law on abortion should be left totally to the democratic process? I oppose abortion. But an amazing number of people thought that...

The continuing contemporary interest in Thomas More (1478-1535) is hardly to be accounted for by popular fascination with sixteenth-century English politics or even by admiration for a martyr to a religious cause no longer universally popular. St. Thomas More (1477-1535) More lived, as we live today, in a time of rapid social and cultural unraveling. The meaning of his life, at least for us, is not so much his worldly success and religious piety, extraordinary as both of these were, but rather the courage and consistency with which he opposed the forces of disintegration. The culture war of the early...

No one suggests that the GOP should sink this low. But they also need not fear to ask tough questions of Sotomayer!Within 45 minutes of the July 1st announcement by President Reagan that he had selected Robert Bork to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court Senator Ted Kennedy took to the Senate floor and unleashed this fireball of hate. The speech was telecast live on national TV: SEN. KENNEDY: "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in...

Part 3 of a symposium on the career of Judge Robert Bork and the publication of A Time to Speak. Part 1. Part 2.When Slouching Toward Gomorrah appeared, it bore on its dust jacket a few words of mine praising the book and its distinguished author: “The ideological triumph of liberalism among American elites, far from bringing the individual and social enlightenment it promised, has produced unprecedented decay. The principal victims of this decay are the poorest and most vulnerable among us, those most in need of a healthy culture. Bork courageously and boldly states these truths. A judge as...

February 13Judge Robert Bork discusses concerns about potential infringement upon religious freedom under the new administration