Free Republic

Once upon a time, a Supreme Court nomination was largely noncontentious. The general approach of the Senate’s advise-and-consent mandate was that the primary determination of who should earn a seat on the bench was determined by voters in the most recent presidential election. Nominees were often simply confirmed on a voice vote, sent by the Senate to lifetime appointments across the street with little debate. As you probably noticed, that is no longer the case. Not only are voice votes extinct, so are broadly bipartisan confirmation votes. The last Supreme Court nominee to have received more than 70 votes was...

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...

I play a dopey Internet Words with Friends game, it’s Scrabble. Certain words were on the board and I had my seven letter tablets It came to me instantly and I thought, no way in hell. I played “Borked” and was rewarded with 42 points, probably my second best of all time. I would post the screenshot I took but, going through the FR woodpile or whatever it’s called, I don’t have the BS, PHD and NWO or whatever skills to post it. Believe it or Borking not, a true story

Install. Uninstall. Boot. Repeat Microsoft has quietly updated a support document to let us know that Windows 10 will have a crack at uninstalling borked updates – just in time for patch Tuesday.Windows 10 endures enjoys a near constant stream of updates and patches to, as Microsoft put it, "keep your device secure and running at peak efficiency". This is all well and good, but as a significant section of customers would agree, things sometimes go wrong and a hasty uninstall is required.Microsoft has therefore tweaked Windows 10 to spot a recovery from a failed startup (after all, a reboot...

Are you happy now, Teddy Kennedy? Are you happy, Joe Biden? Are you happy now, Harry Reid? It’s due to the things that you did and said that Donald J. Trump is now naming his second Supreme Court justice in under two years in office. It is your fault that the once courtly process of Supreme Court appointments turned into the blood-and-thunder-eye-gouging drama that we hate and we live through today. It was 31 years ago, in 1987, that Edward M. Kennedy burst on the floor of the Senate to tell us all that with Robert Bork on the Supreme...

The president is expected to nominate a conservative to replace the justice who authored most of the pro-LGBT decisions of the last 20 years. President Trump's coming announcement of his nominee to fill Justice Anthony Kennedy’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court has many members of America’s LGBT community understandably on edge. The stakes for LGBT people are enormous, given Kennedy's history of embracing LGBT people under the constitution’s protections and questions about whether a new Trump-appointed justice may turn the court in a very different direction. Though LGBT rights have come a long way since Kennedy began authoring pro-LGBT...

Last week the left tried to Bork Steve Bannon, a key Trump campaign aide and proposed “chief White House strategist and senior counselor” and until August executive chairman of Breitbart News, by linking him to the alt-right. The Trumpist response to the attack was haul out Breitbart journalists and others to deny that Bannon and Breitbart had anything to do with the alt-right. Then the NeverTrumpers got into the act to say that while Bannon was innocent of the charges there was no doubt that Breitbart was playing with fire where the alt-right was concerned. I think that the Trump...

Embattled U.N. envoy Susan Rice is dropping out of the running to be the next secretary of state after months of criticism over her Benghazi comments, she told NBC News on Thursday.

(snip) But Joel Bennett, the lawyer for one of the accusers, who is a married federal employee who lives in Maryland, told CBS News today that his client is telling the truth. "I wouldn't characterize it as an ax to grind," Bennett said. "I'm sure she feels as though she wasn't treated properly by Herman Cain." But Bennett said said he does not remember the specific allegations, or what kind of settlement they eventually reached. (snip) "I reference this lady's height," Cain said. "And I was standing near her and I did this, saying 'you're the same height as my...

Here's an FR thread from when Mark Lloyd's article on the "Structural Imbalance in Broadcast Talk Radio" first appeared.

If you think American politics have gotten nastier, crueler, and more symbolic over the last 20 years, blame Ted Kennedy.

In a blistering rebuke, President Bush said Thursday that the Senate's procedure for approving federal judges has become too political and discourages qualified nominees from being considered. "The Senate is no longer asking the right question, whether a nominee is someone who will uphold our Constitution and laws," Bush said in excerpts of a speech he was to deliver Thursday night to The Federalist Society, a conservative group that emphasizes legal matters. "Instead, nominees are asked to guarantee specific outcomes of cases that might come before the court. If they refuse — as they should — they often find their...

The Chronicle's story today on the ongoing furor over Ann Coulter and the 'F-word', reports that the backlash includes a campaign initiated today by a gay rights group and media watchdog to persuade mainstream media outlets to dump her for good. The organizations in question, GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign, are seeking to get rid of Coulter from the airwaves and from being syndicated to newspapers. Is all this a step too far?Ironically, GLAAD itself is the target of a campaign by the American Family Association to get the Ford Motor Co., a development noted by the gay web...

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...

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...

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...

just breaking!!!!!!!!

Dear Laura Ingraham (AKA Helen of Troy): Shutup And Talk Just as your book Shut Up And Sing disqualifies actors and singers from exhibiting their political preferences because of their lack of expertise, I am asking you to call off the dogs on Harriet Miers. I am not merely a mind numbed loyalist to President Bush; I am only asking that you do criticize Harriet Miers, but not as obsessively - 7/24 - as you have. IOW How about another subject, Laura? You cannot see that you are becoming the elitist that you accuse everyone else of being. Who are...

With a Republican Senate, President Bush has the chance to succeed where Reagan failed by getting a conservative constitutionalist confirmed to the Supreme Court.ON OCTOBER 23, 1987--a day that lives in conservative infamy--Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by a Democratic Senate. Now, 18 years later, George W. Bush has the chance to reverse this defeat, and to begin to fulfill what has always been one of the core themes of modern American conservatism: the relinking of constitutional law and constitutional jurisprudence to the Constitution.The restoration of constitutional government has been the one area in which modern...

When Robert Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987, the Reagan White House was not prepared to fight effectively for his confirmation. Indeed, Bork was such a respected judge and admired legal scholar that President Reagan and his aides assumed Bork would have a relatively easy time winning Senate approval. He lost 58-42. In preparing now for a vacancy on the high court, the Bush White House has studied the Bork confirmation fight. And it has learned lessons it hopes will help when President Bush picks a nominee to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the first justice to...