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Posted on 12/19/2012 6:20:43 AM PST by cotton1706
Judge Robert H. Bork, one of the the greatest jurists this country has ever produced, died early this morning from heart complications in a Virginia hospital near his home. He was 84.
Bork was a national celebrity. Several years ago, my wife and I visited the Borks in Maine where they had taken a summer house off Somes Sound. I cannot count the times that total strangers would approach us at a lobster shack or park asking to shake the Judge’s hand and to assure him of their admiration and support.
Bork’s celebrity was only partly conferred upon him by brilliant legal work and his service as Solicitor General and then Acting Attorney General in the tumultuous Watergate years of the Nixon administration. (Andrew McCarthy wrote an excellent summary of Judge Bork’s work in The New Criterion a few years ago: “Robert H. Bork on Law and Life.”) But by far the most important fuel for fame was the riveting, not to say obscene, attack upon his candidacy for the Supreme Court in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan.
The vicious campaign waged against Judge Bork set a new low—possibly never exceeded—in the exhibition of unbridled leftist venom, indeed hate. Reporters combed through the Borks trash hoping to find comprising tidbits; they inspected his movie rentals, and were disgusted to find the films of John Wayne liberally represented. So hysterical was the campaign against Judge Bork that a new transitive verb entered our political vocabulary: “To Bork,” scruple at nothing in order to discredit and defeat a political figure. Monsieur Guillotine gave his name to that means of execution; “progressives,” those leftists haters of America who have so disfigured our national life since the 1960s, gave us the this new form of character assassination. The so-called “Lion of the Senate,” Ted Kennedy, surely one of the most despicable men ever to hold high public office in the United States (yes, that’s saying something), stood on the Senate floor and emitted a serious of calumnious lies designed not simply to prevent Judge Bork from being appointed to the Supreme Court but to soil his character irretrievably. “Robert Bork’s America,” quoth Kennedy,
is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of democracy.
A breathtaking congeries of falsehoods that, were they not protected by the prerogatives of senatorial privilege, would have taken a conspicuous place in the annals of malicious slander and character assassination. In The Tempting of America, Judge Bork recounts his incredulity at this tissue of malign fabrication. “It had simply never occurred to me that anybody could misrepresent my career and views as Kennedy did.” At the time, he notes, many people thought that Kennedy had blundered by emitting so flagrant, and flagrantly untrue, an attack. They were wrong. His “calculated personal assault, . . . more violent than any against a judicial nominee in our country’s history,” did the job (with a little help from Joe Biden and Arlen Specter). Not only was Kennedy instrumental in preventing a great jurist from taking his place on the Supreme Court, he also contributed immeasurably to the cheapening of American political discourse.
In a way, Robert Bork had the last laugh. Ted Kennedy went to his grave a rancid, lumbering, pathetic laughing stock. Bork went from intellectual triumph to intellectual triumph, contributing now-classic studies to the library of legal understanding and penning two of the most important works of social criticism of the last several decades, the aofremention Tempting of America and Slouching Toward Gemorrah, wild bestsellers both. I am proud to say that this spring Encounter Books will be publishing a memoir by Judge Bork called Saving Justice: Watergate,. The Saturday Night Massacre, and Other Adventures of a Solicitor General.
Bob Bork was a great American and a dear friend, witty, compassionate, with a laser-like analytical mind and compendious store of cultural reference. (It was he who introduced me to John Buchan’s marvelous memoir Memory, Hold the Door.) I will have more to say about Bob and his achievement in due course. For now, I wish merely to register my gratitude for his friendship, admiration of his work, and sorrow at his passing. Requiescat in pace.
There would never have been a “Saturday Night Massacre” if only Nixon had not forced Richard Kleindienst to resign as Attorney General. Kleindienst, a Goldwater man, would never have hired Archibald Cox, a Kennedy man, to investigate the Nixon administration.
A great man who would have made an excellent attorney general had he not been treated with gross and insulting behavior by the likes of the lousy DemocRAT congress!
Rest In Peace, Judge Bork.
Rot in hell you evil detractors!
God Save America from Bronco Bama and his legions of evil, God-less communists.
May the choirs of angels come to greet you.
May they speed you to paradise.
May the Lord enfold you in his mercy.
May you find eternal life.
Yes, a great human being has left our world. God bless Robert H. Bork.
Except for FOX, the media will not even be “balanced” in their non-memorial memorial: they will dutifully report the
“controversial” nomination for the Supreme Court (made only controversial by the trail-blazing psychotic Ted Kennedy) and leave it at that. Since Kennedy has already been anointed as A Great Dead Man, Bork will be mis-remembered by the Low-Information Viewer the only way he can be, as a quaint casualty of an earlier period, when the Left was beginning to find its voice , the voice of over-the-top Demagoguery.
I often lament about the "what ifs", "if only" he had become a SCOTUS judge. What a pleasure it would have been to have read his decisions and opinions. They would have been legendary and strong precedent. Very likely, he might also have been the swing vote in making landmark decisions overruling previous unconstitutional precedent-breaking decisions by previous a left-dominated SCOTUS. (Historically, it appears the most egregious departures for the Constitution have come from a leftist SCOTUS majority.)
His example would almost certainly have been one against "judicial activism" either on the right or the left. What a pleasure it would have been to see how he would have applied the ORIGINAL UNDERSTANDING AND INTENT of the Constitution to a case either in writing for the majority, in concurrence, or in dissent.
I wish people like Bork, Reagan, and Milton Friedman would live forever, because our country and world need these wonderful men so desperately. Heaven's gain, our loss.
I didn’t know him personally. I saw the article and posted it.
He was a great jurist. One of the greatest in American history. It’s a shame we didn’t have his towering intellect on the US Supreme Court.
I have been watching Faux News now for over an hour. Not one mention of this conservative giant. For all intents and purposes Faux has turned into just another liberal news channel.
I don't know if this was early in his career or later, but, to me, his reasoning was more important than his conclusions. His approach, which should be followed by all judges, especially federal judges, was to put his own personal values and biases aside and faithfully apply the original understanding and intent of the law (in this case, the Constitution) as best as possible. That's the best anyone can do. It doesn't guarantee perfect results, but nothing is prefect and this faithful methodology is the truest and most integrated judicial approach there is to Constitutional law.
Strange...the first report I heard of this was on Fox News this morning.
He would have made a heck of a Supreme Court justice.
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Just saw this posted. Just damn.
Thank you, Your Honor.
Fox has not mentioned his passing and I have been watching for well over an hour. They have mentioned the “marine” whose under arrest in Mexico over a rifle. They keep showing him in his military uniform and saying “marine corporal this, marine corporal that”. The man is not a marine. He is a marine veteran, but for some strange reason Fox likes to pretend that no one ever gets out of the military when they go in.
RIP, Judge Bork. Thank you for your love of America and your unfailing defense of her Constitution.
May the Bork be with you.. He was a good man regardless liebrals insane attempts to smear him, he saw thru them like a Harry Reid budget proposal.. there was nothing there.
RIP Judge Bork
A loss of a great and honorable man.
RIP Judge.
His approach, which should be followed by all judges, especially federal judges, was to put his own personal values and biases (the basis for “judicial activism”) aside and faithfully apply the original understanding and intent of the law (in this case, the Constitution) as best as possible. That's the best anyone can do. It doesn't guarantee perfect results, but nothing is prefect and this faithful methodology is the truest and most integrated judicial approach there is to Constitutional law.
His example would almost certainly have been one against "judicial activism" either on the right or the left. What a pleasure it would have been to see how he would have applied the Constitution to a case either in writing for the majority, in concurrence, or in dissent.
I wish people like Bork, Reagan, and Milton Friedman would live forever, because our country and world need these wonderful men so desperately. Heaven's gain, our loss.
RIP. Another victim of the leftist-hate America smear machine.
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