Posted on 10/09/2005 12:44:21 PM PDT by Constitution Restoration Act
Legendary conservative jurist Robert Bork is "borking" Bush Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, trashing her nomination as a complete and total "disaster."
Asked by MSNBC's Tucker Carlson Friday night if he was impressed by Ms. Miers, Bork replied: "Not a bit. I think it's a disaster on every level."
The Yale-trained judge said he didn't like the Texas attorney because she hadn't developed a "constitutional philosophy."
"It's a little late to develop a constitutional philosophy or begin to work it out when you're on the court already," he told Carlson. "I'm afraid she's likely to be influenced by factors, such as personal sympathies and so forth, that she shouldn't be influenced by."
The renowned legal scholar said he was also worried that Bush's decision to pick someone whose views were on key issues were so unclear was "a slap in the face to the conservatives who've been building up a conservative legal movement for the last 20 years."
"All of those people have been overlooked. And I think one of the messages here is, don't write, don't say anything controversial before you're nominated."
Asked about Miers' chances for confirmation, Bork predicted, "I think they're probably pretty high because -- and this should give the president some pause -- the Democrats seem to like her."
Bork's own 1987 Supreme Court nomination by President Reagan went down in flames when Democrats like Ted Kennedy seized on his ample legal paper trail to trash him as a racist.
Reason: Who Should Reign Supreme?: ...
Nominees for the Court: Judge Alex Kozinski, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit; Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University; Ron Paul, U.S. House of Representatives (R-Texas).
All three of my nominees share some truly invaluable traits. Each has successfully triumphed over a form of tyranny: Kozinski escaped from Eastern European communism, George neutralized a liberal Princeton faculty, and Paul has resisted the Republican House leadership. Each believes the Constitution means what it says; that is, that the federal government is legally limited to the 18 specific powers given to it in the Constitution, and that the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are in fact guaranteed and cannot be taken away by Congress or the executive branch. They all hold that life begins at conception. They also believe that our rights are pre-political, hence natural, hence they come from God, not the government, not the consent of the governed, and not from any other source. Finally, and just as important as all of the above, each of my nominees possesses great personal courage.
Of all Supreme Court decisions ever rendered, Dred Scott is probably the one most universally denounced. Yet it went nowhere near as far on the issue of slavery as Roe v. Wade did on the issue of abortion; and, intellectually empty as its arguments may be, they are not quite as empty as those of Roe v. Wade. The Constitution does make explicit concessions to slavery from which one can at least speculate on what the legal implications of the practice should be; but there is nothing in the document about either abortion or the so-called right of privacy on which the abortion liberty was said to depend. More important, Dred Scott never intimated that the freedom to own slaves was guaranteed absolutely by the Constitution in the way that Roe v. Wade decided that the freedom to abort one’s children is. It made no claim that legislatures could not control, limit, or ban slavery within the borders of the states they represented. Illinois had done so and so had all the other northern states, and no question was raised about their ability to do what they had done.
To put it another way: If Roe v. Wade had gone only as far on the issue of abortion as Dred Scott had on the issue of slavery, the former’s effect might5 merely have been to deny to the federal government the ability to prohibit abortion in territories; state legislatures could have continued to outlaw abortions as they had seen fit. Abortion would have been allowed in states that chose to make it legal, and in those states unborn children would have been denied all rights—but the existing statutes of the 50 states would not have been affected.
As pro-lifers, which of us would not be overjoyed, relatively speaking, to find ourselves in the situation in which Dred Scott left the abolitionists—a situation in which the ordinary mechanisms of democracy, established for just such purposes, could still be relied upon?
"As noted before, the Supreme Court did not invent abortion. There might be plenty of abortion, perhaps authorized or permitted by state laws, even without Roe and Casey. Moreover, the Court is, arguably, not directly responsible for the wrong moral choices of individuals that the Court's decisions permit. Finally, the Court is not responsible - cannot be responsible, consistent with its constitutional role - for correcting all injustices, even grave ones. But the Court is responsible for the injustices that it inflicts on society that are not consistent with, but in fact betray, its constitutional responsibilities. To the extent that the Court has invalidated essentially all legal restriction of abortion, it has authorized private violence on a scale, and of a kind, that unavoidably evokes the memories of American slavery and of the Nazi Holocaust. And by cloaking that authorization in the forms of the law - in the name of the Supreme Law of the Land - the Court has taught the American people that such private violence is a right and, by clear implication, that it is alright. Go ahead. The Constitution is on your side. This is among your most cherished constitutional freedoms. Nobody ought to oppose you in your action. We have said so.
The decision in Casey, reaffirming Roe and itself reaffirmed and extended in Carhart, in my view exposes the Supreme Court, as currently constituted, as a lawless, rogue institution capable of the most monstrous of injustices in the name of law, with a smugness and arrogance worthy of the worst totalitarian dictatorships of all time. The Court, as it stands today, has, with its abortion decisions, forfeited its legal and moral legitimacy as an institution. It has forfeited its claimed authority to speak for the Constitution. It has forfeited its entitlement to have its decisions respected, and followed, by the other branches of government, by the states, and by the People. The enthusiasm of liberal intelligentsia for the Court's abortion decisions, the sycophancy of the law professorate, of the legal profession, and of our elected officials, and the docility of the American people with respect to our lawless, authoritarian Court rivals the pliancy of the most cowardly, servile peoples toward ruinous, brutal, anti-democratic regimes throughout world history. We suffer people to commit despicable acts of private violence and we welcome - some of us revere - a regime that destroys popular government for the sake of perverted, Orwellian notions of "liberty." After a twentieth century that saw some of the worst barbarisms and atrocities ever committed by humankind, at a time when humankind supposedly had progressed to more enlightened states, we still have not learned. The lesson of the Holocaust - "Never Forget" - is lost. We fail to recognize the amazing capacity of human beings to commit unthinkable, barbaric evil, and of others to tolerate it. We remember and are aghast at the atrocities of others, committed in the past, or in distant lands today. But we do not even recognize the similar atrocities that we ourselves commit, and tolerate, today."Michael
Stokes Paulsen, The Worst Constitutional Decision of All Time, 78 Notre Dame L. Rev. 995, 1003-1007 (2003).
Judge Bork would have made a fantastic Chief Justice. Ronald the Great should have fought for him tooth and nail, bit didn't.
Yawn
Ironic, isn't it that Miers understands the second amendment and Bork doesn't.
Welcome to Free Republic!
If she doesn't understand it like Bush does -- lip-service and no action. Come to think of it, who advised Bush on this? Could it have been her?
Bork was annoying then and he is annoying now.
Bork isn't actually "borking" Miers, he's just correctly pointing out that rather than fight the good fight Bush is wussing out, perhaps afraid of his nominee getting borked. Or if he's not ducking maybe he's not really conservative. All these years of building momentum, 55 Senators, and at a crucial point in time it seems he's doing a Sir Robin.
Hmm. So many elitists on the right?
If you find an article you find interesting, why don't you start a thread yourself? Busting in on another thread and then posting a bunch of paragraphs from different sources - and then not explaining which paragraphs come from where - is confusing and bad form.
"Bork is a great man a true conservative".
Gee Michael, why don't you tell us what you really think?
So Bork is borking Bush then.
Maybe Bush is pre-borking his own candidates?
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