Posted on 07/16/2009 10:01:29 AM PDT by Jim Robinson
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 - Click Here Now
Bork was solicitor general and was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals before President Ronald Reagan nominated him for the Supreme Court in 1987. The Democratic Senate rejected his nomination after a contentious debate, and the seat on the bench eventually went to Anthony Kennedy.
Newsmax.TV's Ashley Martella observed that Bork's "savaging by the left" forever changed the way judges are confirmed, with politics and demographics becoming more important than competence and qualifications.
"That's entirely true," said Bork, whose latest book is "A Time to Speak — Selected Writings and Arguments."
"But the Supreme Court has only itself to blame for that. The Supreme Court made itself, starting in the 1950s, into an increasingly political institution, and once you're a political institution with that kind of power, people are going to fight to control the institution any way they can.
"In my case, I think the trigger was the fear that I might vote to overrule Roe against Wade."
Martella asked whether Sotomayor's statement that a Latina woman could make smarter decisions than a white male should have been "an immediate disqualifier."
"Yes," Bork stated...
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
“How did this man not get confirmed?!!”
It may be fortunate that he wasn’t. As I recall in one of his books he said the 2nd ammendment wasn’t an individual right.
It’s pretty obvious that he didn’t bat his eyelashes at the Congressmen enough.
When you look at ----and hear---- the inferior nominee we have now----it's even more nauseating.
There are thousands of distinguished jurists out there-with a judge's required demeanor-----who are 1000 times more qualified than this grinning, self-absorbed nom...........
Just makes me ill.
It’s sad a man of this caliber is on the outside looking in. This doesn’t speak well for our country.
EXCERPT-—LETTER TO THE NY POST:
Sotomayor has an “us vs. them” attitude. She gave that away with her “wise Latina” put-down of white male judges, and she will use her bias to rationalize and shape her decisions.
BUMP
Bork couldn’t find the RKBA in the first ten amendments to the constitution. Had he been on the High Court, the recent “personal right” issue may have gone against gun ownership.
I wonder what Miguel Estrada thinks as well.
I couldn’t remember his name, thank you!
I wish one, just ONE, Republican Senator would get in Leahy’s face and ask him if having Hispanics on the court was such a welcome idea, why he wrote such racist memos trying to keep Estrada off.
_______________________________________________________________
Their Will Be Done: How the Supreme Court sows moral anarchy. Robert H. Bork Tuesday, July 12, 2005
What do the nomination of a replacement for Sandra Day O’Connor, constitutional law, and moral chaos have to do with one another? A good deal more than you may think.
In Federalist No. 2, John Jay wrote of America that “providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.” Such a people enjoy the same moral assumptions, the cement that forms a society rather than a cluster of groups.
Though Jay’s conditions have long been obsolete, until recently Americans did possess a large body of common moral assumptions rooted in our original Anglo-Protestant culture, and expressed in law. Now, however, a variety of disintegrating influences are undermining that unanimity, not least among them is the capture of constitutional law by an extreme liberationist philosophy. America is becoming a cacophony of voices proclaiming different, or no, truths.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “if each undertook himself to form all his opinions and to pursue the truth in isolation down paths cleared by him alone, it is not probable that a great number of men would ever unite in any common belief. . . . Without common ideas there is no common action, and without common action men still exist, but a social body does not.”
Contrast Tocqueville with Justices Harry Blackmun and Anthony Kennedy. Justice Blackmun wanted to create a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy because of the asserted “‘moral fact’ that a person belongs to himself and not others nor to society as a whole.”
Justice Kennedy, writing for six justices, did invent that right, declaring that “at the heart of [constitutional] liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
Neither of these vaporings has the remotest basis in the actual Constitution, and neither has any definable meaning other than that a common morality may not be sustained by law if a majority of justices prefer that each individual follow his own desires.
Once the justices depart, as most of them have, from the original understanding of the principles of the Constitution, they lack any guidance other than their own attempts at moral philosophy, a task for which they have not even minimal skills. Yet when it rules in the name of the Constitution, whether it rules truly or not, the court is the most powerful branch of government in domestic policy. The combination of absolute power, disdain for the historic Constitution and philosophical incompetence is lethal.
The court’s philosophy reflects, or rather embodies and advances the liberationist spirit of our times. In moral matters, each man is a separate sovereignty. In its insistence on radical personal autonomy, the court assaults what remains of our stock of common moral beliefs. That is all the more insidious because the public and the media take these spurious constitutional rulings as not merely legal conclusions but moral teachings supposedly incarnate in our most sacred civic document.
That teaching is the desirability, as the sociologist Robert Nisbet put it, of the “break-up of social molecules into atoms, of a generalized nihilism toward society and culture as the result of individualistic hedonism and the fragmenting effect of both state and economy.”
He noted that both Edmund Burke and Tocqueville placed much of the blame for such developments on the intellectual class—in our time dominant in, for example, the universities, the media, church bureaucracies and foundation staffs—a class to which judges belong and to whose opinions they respond. Thus ever-expanding rights continually deplete America’s bank of common morality.
Consider just a few of the court’s accomplishments: The justices have weakened the authority of other institutions, public and private, such as schools, businesses and churches; assisted in sapping the vitality of religion through a transparently false interpretation of the establishment clause; denigrated marriage and family; destroyed taboos about vile language in public; protected as free speech the basest pornography, including computer-simulated child pornography; weakened political parties and permitted prior restraints on political speech, violating the core of the First Amendment=s guarantee of freedom of speech; created a right to abortion virtually on demand, invalidating the laws of all 50 states; whittled down capital punishment, on the path, apparently, to abolishing it entirely; mounted a campaign to normalize homosexuality, culminating soon, it seems obvious, in a right to homosexual marriage; permitted discrimination on the basis of race and sex at the expense of white males; and made the criminal justice system needlessly slow and complex, tipping the balance in favor of criminals.
Justice O’Connor, a warm, down-to-earth, and very likeable person, joined many, though not all of these bold attempts to remake America attempt to remake America. Whatever one may think of think these outcomes as matters of policy, not one is authorized by the Constitution, and some are directly contrary to it. All of them however, are consistent with the left-liberalist impulse that advances moral anarchy.
Democratic senators’ filibusters of the president’s previous President’s previous judicial nominees demonstrate liberals’ determination to retain the court as their political weapon. They claim that conservative critics of the court threaten the independence of the judiciary, as though independence is a warrant to abandon the Constitution for personal predilection.
The court’s critics are not angry without cause; they have been provoked.
The court has converted itself from a legal institution to a political one, and has made so many basic and unsettling changes in American government, life and culture that a counterattack was inevitable, and long overdue. If the critics’ rhetoric is sometimes overheated, it is less so than that of some Democratic senators and their interest-group allies.
The leaders of the Democratic Party in the Senate are making it the party of moral anarchy, and they will fight to keep the court activist and liberal. The struggle over the Supreme Court is not just about law: it is about the future of our culture.
To restore the Court’s integrity will require a minimum of three appointments of men and women who have so firm an understanding of the judicial function that they will not drift left once on the bench. Choosing, and fighting for, the right man or woman to replace Justice O’Connor is the place to start. That will be difficult, but the stakes are the legitimate scope of self-government and an end to judicially imposed moral disorder.
Mr. Bork, a former judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals (D.C. Circuit), is a fellow at the Hudson Institute and editor of “A Country I Do Not Recognize: The Legal Assault on American Values.”
“I wish one, just ONE, Republican Senator would get in Leahy’s face and ask him if having Hispanics on the court was such a welcome idea, why he wrote such racist memos trying to keep Estrada off.”
Don’t we all.
““A Country I Do Not Recognize: The Legal Assault on American Values.””
None of us do, Mr. Bork.
Pass the upchuck cup.
Sotomayor is an affirmative action token aimed at nailing the Hispanic vote, nothing more. The democrats don’t really care if she is qualified or not, she is the right minority in their agenda. Sadly, most Americans are incapable of following ther truth because they will be spoonfed the democrat criminal enterprise lies via the enemedia who serve them exclusively. An affirmative action pres__ent makes affirmative action apponitments and nominations ... are we really that surprised?
Olds Rocket 88 Submarine Commander Teddy Kennedy’s speech “Judge Bork’s world...” is one of the lowest and most swinish speeches ever made in the Senate.
bump
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