Solicitor General Robert Bork, yes, that Robert Bork, then fired Cox.
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That left solicitor general Bork in charge — and Bork did the deed.
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In short, Bork was "Borked" not by Democrats or liberals, but by Robert Bork.
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If Anthony Kennedy turned out to be, as some predicted, "Bork lite" or "Bork without the bite," voting as a Justice Bork would have voted, then the answer would be clear.
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Nixon then named Solicitor General Robert Bork his attorney general, and Bork fired the prosecutor, Archibald Cox — infuriating Congress.
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Reagan appointed Robert Bork to the seat the next month, but Bork was rejected by the Senate in a partisan 58-42 vote.
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The currently reigning paradigm originated in the 1970s with Robert Bork—the same Bork whom the Senate would later block from the Supreme Court.
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Republicans like to say that Democrats' 1987 blocking of Robert Bork marked the beginning of the politicization of Supreme Court nominations, but Democrats did give Mr. Bork a vote.
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Using a model that looks at all nominations since Bork, I calculated that Kavanaugh would probably need to be at least as unpopular as Bork to be voted down.
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Bork v Scalia; Roberts v Luttig In 33, Reagan aides debated whether to name Scalia or Bork, both of whom were on the D.C. Circuit to a Supreme Court opening.
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Mr. McGahn, saying that he wanted to be more like Judge Bork and not "Saturday Night Massacre Bork," drove to the office to pack his possessions and submit his resignation.
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In the law — in the doctrine — Bork has won.
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" Judge Bork: "I think, Senator, that is not correct.
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Bork was subjected to such a long, drawn out, politically disastrous cavity search by Senate Democrats that "to bork" is now in dictionaries as a verb, meaning "to obstruct," particularly for political reasons.
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Reagan's first choice, Robert Bork, was rejected by the Senate.
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Indeed, the Senate rejected Bork outright, on a bipartisan basis.
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The Senate rejected Bork, and Miers withdrew under intense criticism.
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A memorable exception to this average, though, is Robert Bork.
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Conservatives emerged from the Bork battle bent on winning control.
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Judge Bork testified about his views for five spellbinding days.
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To his credit, Bork testified candidly about his constitutional vision.
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Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the Robert H. Bork hearings.
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Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the Robert H. Bork hearings.
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Kavanaugh's approval is worse than any nominee since Robert Bork.
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Bork would subsequently be denied a seat on the Supreme Court.
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Cox was eventually fired by then-US Solicitor General Robert Bork.
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If Reagan had just nominated Bork while he still had a
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The most recent was Robert Bork in 1987, a Reagan appointee.
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The Senate's rejection of Bork incenses American conservatives to this day.
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The solicitor general, Robert Bork, finally agreed to do Nixon's bidding.
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Not all differences between Bork and Kennedy would have pleased conservatives.
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For Democrats, that ended in 1987 with the Borking of Bork.
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The night ended with Cox's firing by Solicitor General Robert Bork.
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Post-Bork, the Senate hearings have tended to shed little light.
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Instead, it is what Bork did afterward that is so important.
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For instance, in 1987, a Democrat-controlled Senate voted down President Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork by 280-251 even though Bork had strong formal credentials for the job and a reputation for brilliant legal scholarship.
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Groups such as the ACLU, Center For American Progress, and many others have already galvanized Democratic senators to attempt to "Bork" the Kavanaugh nomination, just as they did to President Reagan and Judge Robert Bork in 1987.
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Robert Bork, whose nomination was ultimately defeated in 1987, waited 108 days.
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The Senate's consideration of Judge Robert Bork is the most relevant precedent.
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After his own confirmation controversy, Judge Robert Bork retired from the courts.
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Solicitor General Robert Bork fired Cox, but the investigation did not end.
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President Ronald Reagan nominated D.C. Circuit Judge Robert Bork to replace Powell.
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In reality, the occasional touch probably isn't going to bork your screen.
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The most recent nominee to walk away was Robert Bork, in 1987.
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Significantly, he would abandon the Bork presumption that vertical mergers benefit consumers.
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President Ronald Reagan's failed nomination of Robert Bork is a good example.
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Despite Scalia's efforts, originalism remained politically tainted by the memory of Bork.
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President Nixon had the solicitor general, Robert H. Bork, fire Mr. Cox.
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As acting attorney general, Bork appointed a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski.
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Zech — a case in which Bork and future Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had ruled that there was no "Constitutional right to engage in homosexual conduct" and thus no right to privacy for it — provided hope that putting Bork on the Court would move the Court further in their direction (though Reagan himself pitched Bork as a "moderate," which in turn enraged conservatives at the Justice Department).
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After a famously bitter fight over the nomination of the conservative Robert Bork in the late 80s—Bork was the rare nominee to go down—presidents went out of their way to pick mostly non-controversial judges, Wheeler noted.
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This all sounds like Senator Ted Kennedy&aposs infamous speech about Robert Bork.
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It worked in the case of Judge Bork because he was very defensive.
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I'm on the side of Brandeis, and I don't agree with Robert Bork.
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This whole system used to be separate from politics until one word, Bork.
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Bork was the first time when the media -- they broke that political seal.
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They&aposve been pulling this out since Bork&aposs nomination in the 153s.
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Democratic Senate in 1987, but this is misleading—Bork was given a full
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Kennedy was confirmed after Democrats killed the nomination of conservative jurist Robert Bork.
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We all remember what happened to President Ronald Reagan's nominee Judge Robert Bork.
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Judge Robert H. Bork was crucified when he was a Supreme Court nominee.
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Robert Bork nomination in 1987 as an example of extreme partisanship in the
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Credit for the lack of such cases goes largely to Robert H. Bork.
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It was Robert Bork, who then became acting Attorney General, who dismissed Cox.
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But I would read him the colloquy between Senator Simon and Judge Bork.
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Bork would go on to become a widely admired stalwart within conservative circles.
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What is certain is that Kavanaugh is highly unpopular — in a recent CNN poll, just 37 percent of Americans thought he should be confirmed, the lowest percentage for a Supreme Court nominee since Robert Bork in 1987 (Bork was not confirmed).
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You&aposve been hearing this hysteria over reaction dating back to Bork and before.
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Republicans point to Democratic tactics during the hearing for Robert Bork, a Reagan nominee.
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But here's a big difference: Bork was blindsided by the rapid succession of events.
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Bork suddenly found himself in the spotlight and felt the political consequences for decades.
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Had Bork taken the seat that went to Kennedy, Roe would have been obliterated.
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Edward Kennedy's (D-Mass.) personal destruction of Judge Robert Bork, a President Reagan nominee.
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Like Kennedy, Bork would have sometimes pleased conservatives and at other times alienated them.
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Rather, it is time for a return to the principles that Judge Bork championed.
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In other words, conservatives emerged from the Bork battle determined to win the war.
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Legislation also should be pursued to impose the Bork protections on the Mueller investigation.
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Of course it's possible Kavanaugh will make a bad public impression, like Robert Bork.
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Robert Bork, the solicitor general, complied with the president's order to fire Mr. Cox.
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The Justice Department, in a brief signed by Solicitor General Robert H. Bork, disagreed.
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But when presidents sought to make political appointment – like Bork – the nominees went down.
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Bork was a conservative intellectual, but his nomination took a nasty turn after Sen.
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I guess it's possible that Kavanaugh could become even more unpopular than Bork was.
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Both of us have been head of the solicitor general's office, where Bork served.
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Solicitor General Robert H. Bork, serving as acting attorney general in their absence, fired Cox.
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People now talk about the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings, not the Robert Bork ones.
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In the end, Nixon's solicitor general, Robert Bork, did the president's bidding and fired Cox.
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Solicitor General Robert Bork eventually fired Cox; days later, Leon Jaworski was named special prosecutor.
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The Bork nomination did not destroy the norm of deference to the president's choice for
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An impressive 114 days after Ronald Reagan nominated Bork in 1987, his nomination was rejected.
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To replace him, Reagan first tapped Robert Bork, a prominent federal judge and legal scholar.
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Wade and to limit school prayer, something Bork publicly declared he would not have done.
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Judge Bork, let's not forget, got a hearing, a committee vote, and a floor vote.
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Linda Greenhouse So it's going to be the Bork Battle all over again, is it?
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At the time, Bork publicly declared that he would have come out the other way.
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But Ruckelshaus also refused and resigned, and eventually then-solicitor general Robert Bork fired Cox.
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The firings elevated then-Solicitor General Robert Bork to the head of the Justice Department.
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Its first faculty advisers were Robert H. Bork at Yale and Antonin Scalia at Chicago.
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But the most consequential Reagan nomination, that of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, failed.
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Cox was then dismissed by Robert Bork, who had quickly been designated acting attorney general.
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Bork was rejected by the Senate, with only 42 votes in favor of his confirmation.
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Drug regulation is a fertile environment for the type of abuse that Bork spoke of.
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" The 58-to-42 rejection in 1987 of Judge Robert H. Bork, nominated by President Ronald Reagan, gave the English language the verb "to bork," defined by Oxford as to "obstruct (someone, especially a candidate for public office) by systematically defaming or vilifying them.
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So [to Bork] antitrust lawyers should get out of the business of calling good or evil.
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That left Robert Bork, the solicitor general, as the highest-ranking official in the Justice Department.
|
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Nixon ended up outsourcing the deed to Robert Bork, who formally fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox.
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It intensified scrutiny of Nixon -- another Watergate prosecutor was named -- and left a cloud over Bork.
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The "almost always efficient" prong holds true in a narrower set of circumstances than Bork imagined.
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"Robert Bork was rejected, and Justice Kennedy took his place," she said on the Senate floor.
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Solicitor General Robert Bork ultimately fired Cox, completing what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre.
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But the irony is that one of the key exponents of the school was Robert Bork.
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The third-ranking Justice Department official, Solicitor General Robert Bork, obeyed Nixon's order to fire Cox.
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Mark Gitenstein was Chief Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Bork hearings in 85033.
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"We have the same problem in Europe," Magdalena Bork, 41, who was visiting from Vienna, said.
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Initially, Reagan tried and failed to appoint a judge named Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.
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Would she want to carry the same weight under which Bork labored for all his life?
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Almost the same thing happened when President Ronald Reagan nominated the staunch conservative Robert H. Bork.
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Solicitor General Robert Bork assumed the role of acting attorney general and complied with Nixon's demand.
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After the Senate rejected Bork 58-42, Reagan nominated Judge Douglas Ginsburg from the D.C. Circuit.
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That was ancient history by the time Bork, who died in 2012, entered the hearing room.
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Bork hardly helped his cause with a public mien that struck many as severe, even forbidding.
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Bork was voted down by a Democrat-controlled Senate because his conservative record was so extensive.
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|
Bork, for example, initially had a one-point net favorability rating in a Times Mirror poll.
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What's the point: Kavanaugh is the least liked Supreme Court nominee since Robert Bork in 1987.
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Bork, though, was a conservative appointed by a Republican when he faced a Democratic-controlled Senate.
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Judge Robert Bork answered nearly every question from senators over five days of testimony in 1987.
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Finally it fell to the solicitor general, Bork, to carry out the order, which he did.
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Bork was harshly criticized for doing so, and we aren't interested in reopening that debate here.
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Before his nomination, Biden had said that he would support Bork, seeming to reject Kennedy's rhetoric.
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|
Now, according to the Justice Department's line of succession, Solicitor General Robert Bork was in charge.
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"Your agreement to follow in the footsteps of Robert Bork would provide significant assurances to those who fear your appointment is a prelude to another Saturday Night Massacre," Whitehouse wrote to Barr, referring to an agreement Bork signed allowing a special counsel to work independently. Sen.
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|
Months after defeating the Bork nomination by a bipartisan vote of 265 opposed to 22007 in favor, the Democratic-controlled Senate voted 208 to 70, a month into the 229 presidential election year, to confirm Anthony M. Kennedy to the seat Judge Bork was to have filled.
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First was Robert Bork, which we all remember that sparks a brutal Senate battle, he was defeated.
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The next in the chain of command was Robert Bork, the Solicitor General of the United States.
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And as we speak, you have this all-out effort to Bork Judge Kavanaugh in full swing.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Everyone said when Bork was nominated, well, the southern Democrats will have to go along.
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Even more so than when six Republicans voted against Robert Bork in 1987, defections will be deadly.
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The end result was an opinion that shares the rhetoric, but not the spirit, of Robert Bork.
|
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Although Judge Kavanaugh has a more congenial personality than Bork, senators should not be under any illusions.
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|
Even hardcore conservatives still stewing over the shabby defenestration of Robert Bork find Cruz cloying and unctuous.
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We have not opposed a Supreme Court nominee, liberal or conservative, since Robert H. Bork in 1987.
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Had Judge Bork been confirmed to the Supreme Court, America would be a very different country today.
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Judge Bork did not believe that the Constitution protected the right of women to terminate a pregnancy.
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It was largely due to his tough questioning that Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork was not confirmed.
|
|
Next up was another federal judge, Douglas Ginsburg, a conservative, though a bit more moderate than Bork.
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That also was true in 22016, and the Democrats were far better off with Kennedy than Bork.
|
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Bork, a Yale law professor and former solicitor general of the US, was firmly in the former.
|
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Yet it is also clear that a Justice Bork would have been very different from Justice Kennedy.
|
|
He went on to disappoint conservatives with his record that was more Brennan than Bork in nature.
|
|
How do those two developments relate to each other and to the legacy of the Bork battle?
|
|
Similarly, the tennis legend Björn Bork, reportedly wore the same brand of shirt when preparing for Wimbledon.
|
|
And, soon afterward, in 221, Reagan had the opportunity to appoint another Justice, and named Robert Bork.
|
|
The next in line was solicitor general Robert Bork, who carried out Nixon's orders and fired Cox.
|
|
Bork, the only other nominee with polling as bad as Kavanaugh's, was voted down by the Senate.
|
|
"Bork" became a verb in the dictionary, meaning to obstruct "through systematic defamation or vilification" (The Hill).
|
|
Judge Bork has told us again and again what he believes Justices should and should not do.
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|
The only additional name I found among the other canvases was "BORK" (in "While All the Others Are Working," 2016), a startlingly relevant reference to Robert Bork, Reagan's Supreme Court nominee, whose defeat by a Democratic Senate has been the subject of much commentary over the past two weeks.
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But Bork went further and argued there was no logical or empirical link between competition, profits and concentration.
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|
I was working at the White House when that went down, and I loved Judge Bork of course.
|
|
But four years earlier, the Democrats rejected Robert Bork, President Ronald Reagan's nominee, on the basis of ideology.
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|
Another bork in the wall (xpost r/woof_irl) from DWASBPEIF Why are they the way that they are?
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"The sense of panic and emotion and crisis ... was in the air," Bork recounted during that Senate testimony.
|
|
In what became known as the "Saturday Night Massacre," Solicitor General Robert Bork fired Cox at Nixon's order.
|
|
Just a few years later, hostilities reached new heights when Democrats unapologetically attempted to bork Clarence Thomas's nomination.
|
|
The Bork battle, it seemed, had made the Supreme Court safe for a progressive reading of the Constitution.
|
|
Nixon's Solicitor General Robert H. Bork inherited the top Department of Justice job when Richardson and Ruckelshaus resigned.
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|
This is the first time the board has opposed a Supreme Court nominee since Robert Bork in 1987.
|
|
Justice Clarence Thomas is also a professed originalist, as was President Ronald Reagan's Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.
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|
Bork codified these restrictions in federal regulations, and told the news media that Nixon had agreed to them.
|
|
According to Bork, Nixon promised him the next open spot on the Supreme Court if he fired Cox.
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|
If you go back to Bork, all the way through Harry Reid getting rid of the filibuster in 2013.
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|
If you remember the hearings of Robert Bork, here was a brilliant mind that was poisoned by political venom.
|
|
DJ Schleppscheisse, DJ Devil, and Bork are shifting between drum and bass and trance on a second, smaller floor.
|
|
Recent episodes focus on the failed nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan in 1987.
|
|
Described by Robert Bork as the antitrust division's Vietnam, the suit was dismissed in 22050 during the Reagan administration.
|
|
Some Republicans say that politicization accelerated with the defeat of Ronald Reagan nominee Bork, after 1987 hearings Biden chaired.
|
|
As a younger man I watched nominee Robert Bork being attacked by the liberals of yesterday and by Sen.
|
|
In 22018, Democrats controlled the Senate, and the key to blocking Bork was convincing Southern Democrats, such as Sen.
|
|
Since (and including) the contentious Robert Bork nomination in 1987, this has occurred just 10 times in 565 chances.
|
|
Kennedy came on to the court after the Senate rejected the confirmation of a more conservative nominee, Robert Bork.
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|
Plus, if you jailbreak your phone, the cardmember agreement says you could bork your access to the Card itself.
|
|
Bork, who labeled Roe an "unconstitutional decision" in congressional testimony in 1981, unquestionably would have voted to overrule it.
|
|
President Ronald Reagan's pick, Judge Robert Bork, was outright rejected, as were two of President Richard M. Nixon's selections.
|
|
Most famously, they blocked the highly qualified, and extremely conservative, Robert Bork from joining the Supreme Court in 1987.
|
|
In the 1980s, originalists like Bork agreed that the Second Amendment didn't give individuals a right to bear arms.
|
|
Connecticut, holding unconstitutional a Connecticut statute making it a crime to prescribe contraceptives -- a ruling Bork had long criticized.
|
|
Such "horizontal mergers" between companies with directly competing products are exactly the kind that Bork believed demand extra scrutiny.
|
|
Late in his illustrious career, Judge Robert Bork helped save the nascent internet from being strangled in its crib.
|
|
This year is the 30th anniversary of the titanic battle over President Ronald Reagan's nomination of Robert H. Bork.
|
|
Furthermore, Bork said the president had agreed not to fire Jaworski unless he had bipartisan support among congressional leaders.
|
|
Or it has to just revert back to what it was before the 1960s, when Robert Bork bastardized it.
|
|
TED KENNEDY, MASSACHUSETTS: Robert Bork&aposs America is a land of which women will be forced into back alley abortions.
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Democrats at the time argued that if Bork, a conservative, was on the court, he would roll back abortion rights.
|
|
While Francisco would have no constitutional grounds on which to refuse, he would no doubt remember Solicitor General Robert Bork.
|
|
Five years later, the Senate rejected Reagan's attempt to elevate Bork to the Supreme Court by a 42-58 vote.
|
|
Justice Anthony Kennedy was confirmed on February 3, 1988, but that was after the nomination of Robert Bork was rejected.
|
|
The original 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act occurred in response to the Supreme Court judicial appointment hearings for Robert Bork.
|
|
"Walmart was the perfect creature to emerge from the antitrust changes that took place after the Bork revolution," Lynn said.
|
|
Richardson and his deputy William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than carry out the order, but Solicitor General Robert Bork eventually complied.
|
|
Despite Kavanaugh's potential to replace the court's ideological center, Justice Anthony Kennedy, Senate Democrats are not going to "Bork" Kavanaugh.
|
|
Keep in mind, Democratic senators and liberal groups were able to pull off such a feat with the Bork nomination.
|
|
I think the memo was being prepared in parallel with the so-called Bork brief, which made the same argument.
|
|
Moving down the line after they resigned, Nixon found that Solicitor General Robert Bork was willing to do the deed.
|
|
After Richardson and Ruckelshaus' resignations, Solicitor General Robert Bork (at this point acting head of the Justice Department) fired Cox.
|
|
Nixon's willing executioner back in the October 1973 was the No. 3 man at Justice, the solicitor general Robert Bork.
|
|
After they defeated Judge Bork, Mr. Reagan eventually settled on Justice Kennedy, who was seen as a more moderate choice.
|
|
The third-ranking Justice Department official, Solicitor General Robert H. Bork, complied with Mr. Nixon's order and fired Mr. Cox.
|
|
William T. Coleman, a black Republican attorney and a prominent supporter of Ronald Reagan, was a longtime colleague of Bork.
|
|
It is possible of course that, invested with the robes, Robert Bork would move within the mainstream of constitutional law.
|
|
Conservatives had been burned by the Senate's rejection of ardent originalist Robert Bork when Ronald Reagan had nominated him three years earlier, and didn't want a squish like Anthony Kennedy (who wound up getting the seat intended for Bork as a compromise pick), or another Republican-appointed liberal like John Paul Stevens or Harry Blackmun.
|
|
The first opening on the D.C. Circuit in the Reagan years went to another prominent conservative law professor, Robert H. Bork.
|
|
The next year, Heflin joined several other Southern Democrats in opposing Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the US Supreme Court.
|
|
Kennedy is only on the bench or was because Democrats in the 80s blocked Robert Bork after a very emotional campaign.
|
|
Bill Shine, this is going to be a very important communications message because this is going to be worse than Bork.
|
|
Gore; it survived divisive nomination processes, like the Senate's rejection of Robert Bork and Anita Hill's harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas.
|
|
The president&aposs first choice was ultra-conservative Robert Bork, who faced withering resistance from Democratic senators, and was ultimately rejected.
|
|
We see him soar through the sky with all these gizmos in his new suit, and then completely bork the landing.
|
|
Bork was the Justice Department official who fired Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox in October 1973 on orders from President Richard Nixon.
|
|
Solicitor General Robert Bork, next in line at the Justice Department at the time, finally followed Nixon's order and fired Cox.
|
|
In 28503, Democrats' opposition to President Reagan's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Robert Bork, was so intense that it became a verb.
|
|
Reagan's first choice was Robert Bork, with whom Kennedy shared much by way of conservative ideology but with a crucial difference.
|
|
Bork had been the executioner of the Saturday Night Massacre by following Nixon's order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox.
|
|
It's likely to happen only if the public turns against his confirmation, though, as they did with Robert Bork in 1987.
|
|
The obvious difficulty for Democrats is that it's unlikely Kavanaugh will end up as unpopular as Bork was or Trump is.
|
|
Nixon eventually turned to Solicitor General Robert Bork, who was next in line in the chain of command, who fired Cox.
|
|
On the other hand, Judge Robert H. Bork stepped down from that court in 1988 after the Senate rejected his nomination.
|
|
Bork was voted down by the full Senate, and the vacancy was eventually filled by the far more centrist Anthony Kennedy.
|
|
Judge Bork, then the United States solicitor general, complied with the president's order to fire the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox.
|
|
That ur-Blue Dog cast a critical judiciary committee vote in 1987 to deny a Supreme Court seat to Robert Bork.
|
|
Now 303, Mr. Warner said in an interview that his memories of the Bork hearings had grown foggy over the years.
|
|
Now 303, Mr. Warner said in an interview that his memories of the Bork hearings had grown foggy over the years.
|
|
In 1966, Robert Bork, a corporate lawyer associated with the neoliberal economists at the University of Chicago, authored a bizarre argument.
|
|
Ethan Bronner's "Battle for Justice" (1989) dissects the hearings for Robert H. Bork, who was nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1987.
|
|
According to The Times's critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt the "mesmerizing" book lays out the intellectual and ideological reasons that Bork failed.
|
|
By framing the goal as preserving the constitutional mainstream, the Bork opposition's success necessarily defined the mainstream that existed in 1987.
|
|
A Bork regulation would also assure Mr. Mueller himself that he can carry out his job without the specter of interference.
|
|
But then that Justice official (Robert Bork) appointed a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who ended up investigating the case vigorously.
|
|
Ted Kennedy call Bork a danger to American life, and only with televised Supreme Court nomination hearings did Americans see Sen.
|
|
" When asked why he wanted to be on the Supreme Court, Bork responded that such service would be "an intellectual feast.
|
|
In 1987, Biden was running for president and chairing the Judiciary Committee's hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork.
|
|
Robert Bork defined, and I trust law to be all about consumer welfare, and that was a turn for the worse.
|
|
We see Peter soar through the sky with all these gizmos in his new suit, and then completely bork the landing.
|
|
That led to the need for the Justice Department to file a brief in opposition, which has been referred to as the Bork brief, because Richardson, rather than leaving that to the Civil Division or the workaday portion of the Justice Department, turned to the solicitor general [Robert Bork] to take the lead on the briefs.
|
|
While Bork is [an] ex-Marine and brilliant judge, I would lean to Scalia for the first seat [of Reagan's second term].
|
|
Opposition to Bork, then a veteran judge on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, galvanized immediately. Sen.
|
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I grew up -- when I was -- it was -- when I was in college, it was Bork and that was the big thing.
|
|
After him, the longest-running confirmation process is that of Robert Bork, who waited 114 days before he was rejected in 1987.
|
|
George Conway screamed bloody murder and soon former Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork did too, and the Harriet Miers nomination fell apart.
|
|
He noted that Democrats moved President Reagan's most controversial nominee, Robert Bork, to the floor in 1987, when they controlled the chamber.
|
|
On the Senate floor, Kennedy blasted the nomination on grounds that Bork would take the country backward in civil rights and liberties.
|
|
Kavanaugh's score places him alongside failed nominees Harriet Miers and Robert Bork, both of whom didn't end up on the high court.
|
|
The Bork hearing was political, but "political" included a question regarding whether his views were within the accepted mainstream of legal orthodoxy.
|
|
So unprecedented was this vicious effort to sully the nominee's good name that the Democratic strategy generated its own verb: to bork.
|
|
Even after Robert Bork was blocked in 1987 for his right-wing views, the Senate routinely confirmed justices on a bipartisan basis.
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In his posthumous memoirs, Bork claimed that President Nixon offered him a quid pro quo of an appointment to the Supreme Court.
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" The shadow of Bork hung over the conservative legal movement, and Scalia began by admitting that originalism was "not without its warts.
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Justice Scalia, who was confirmed in 1986, the year before Judge Bork was voted down, was the product of a different era.
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Within weeks of Mr. Biden's official entry, President Ronald Reagan nominated Judge Robert H. Bork, an unflinching conservative, to the Supreme Court.
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Conservatives often cite the Senate's 1987 rejection of Judge Robert Bork to justify modern obstruction, but they are actually proving the precedence point.
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Bork willingly followed Nixon's order terminating Archibald Cox in an act that would only temporarily stall Nixon's slow march to disgrace and resignation.
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Justice Anthony Kennedy was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1987 after his two previous nominations of Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg collapsed.
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The attorney general and his deputy at the time resigned rather than obey Nixon, but Bork, the department's No. 3, followed Nixon's directions.
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Although senators scrutinized his actions from the night of October 20, 1973, Bork lost the seat because of his far-right judicial record.
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Finally, the Kennedy retirement gave President Trump the chance to right the wrong of turning Bork into a verb instead of a justice.
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When asked about whether he believes in the Marfa lights, a common conversation starter at the Parlour, Bork has turned into a believer.
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Unlike many nominees who hide their views, Bork testified at length on his interpretive views, which were far more nuanced than critics suggested.
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At his own hearing, Judge Bork had spoken derisively about Griswold and made clear that he regarded the decision as illegitimate judicial overreach.
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Justice Kennedy was nominated in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan after his first pick, Judge Robert H. Bork, was rejected by the Senate.
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Conservatives, however, note that Kennedy was actually appointed in 1987 — and only after Democrats rejected the more conservative Robert Bork for the seat.
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Our proposed solution is based upon one devised by, of all people, Robert Bork when he was the acting attorney general during Watergate.
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But, though the question was not before the court, Mr. Bork added that "structural features of the Constitution" banned prosecutions of sitting presidents.
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As Republicans like to emphasize, the Democrats were the ones who first rejected a nominee based strictly on ideology: Robert Bork, in 1987.
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Using the same reasoning, Mr. Bork also criticized conservative judges of earlier generations, like those who overruled economic reforms in the Progressive Era.
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The concept was first introduced by conservative judge Robert Bork in 1978, and it's guided a lot of US antitrust policy ever since.
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But, though the question was not before the court, Mr. Bork added that "structural features of the Constitution" barred prosecutions of sitting presidents.
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When I previously wrote on Kavanaugh, I noted that a Bork-like popularity might be low enough for Kavanaugh to get voted down.
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This was an illegal action according to the court and yet, during his confirmation hearings, Judge Bork contended that his actions were lawful.
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That all of this stuff is worse even in stuff I&aposve heard when Robert Bork was the nominee many, many, many moons ago.
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But the formidable infrastructure around conservative nominees I think is really in place because of how Robert Bork was treated in the 240&aposs.
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If anything, the story of Bork and Kennedy shows that it was becoming more acceptable for the Senate to block nominees for ideological reasons.
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"This town could end up closing down because of Brexit," says fisherman Michael Bork, 36, who has been fishing since the age of 10.
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Yet, Reagan also witnessed the last outright Senate rejection of a Supreme Court nominee, Robert Bork in 1987 by a vote of 42-58.
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In the backdrop is Trump's consistent denunciation of Mueller's Russia investigation and the possibility that a Robert Bork would be waiting in the wings.
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"It was one of the oldest—until today—surviving roofs of that kind," says Robert Bork, an architectural historian at the University of Iowa.
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A pro-choice centrist, Specter infuriated the right by grilling President Ronald Reagan's reactionary nominee Robert Bork on abortion and ultimately voting against him.
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The two officials refused and resigned — sparking the "Saturday Night Massacre" — and the special prosecutor was eventually fired by the solicitor general, Robert Bork.
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Apparently a number of reviewers either mistakenly destroyed their phone screens or had the screens bork on them after a few days of use.
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There have been controversial Supreme Court nominations before, notably the failed bid of Robert Bork in 1987 and Clarence Thomas's successful bid in 1991.
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Bork was a rock star of sorts within the conservative legal movement and well-known beyond it for his landmark text on antitrust law.
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Unquestionably qualified by virtue of his intellect, education and experience, Bork was stridently conservative in his long paper trail of judicial opinions and scholarship.
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The Senate wasn't passive; it had previously rejected Reagan's initial nominee, Robert Bork, and Reagan's second choice, Douglas Ginsburg, dropped out of the running.
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Harriet Miers and Robert Bork, two unsuccessful nominees in 2005 and 1987, respectively, were the only Supreme Court nominees to score lower than Kavanaugh.
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A dog's bark ricochets from a few blocks down, but inside, video artist, musician, and restaurateur Adam Bork is about to save my evening.
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When Kennedy arrived, the Senate and the public were exhausted and Kennedy skated to confirmation on the basis that he was not Robert Bork.
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No, they compare Justice Kennedy with Judge Bork, the justice who never was, who indisputably would have turned the court in the opposite direction.
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And, in 1987, when Robert Bork was being considered, his confirmation hearings showed that hereafter, a new criterion for judges had to be considered.
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And only a year before the Bork nomination, the Supreme Court rejected as "facetious" the claim that the Constitution prohibits criminalizing consensual gay sex.
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President Ronald Reagan's nomination of Judge Bork in 1987 left a lasting mark on the confirmation process and gave rise to a new verb.
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Initially, Mr. Biden convinced himself there was a way to do it all: defend his name, win the Bork fight, charge into primary season.
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To Bork, the decision to fire Cox was one he made as a means of protecting the Justice Department and, in effect, the country.
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It simply defies common sense to think that Justice Bork would not effectively do what he has built his career saying should be done.
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Robert Bork was nominated for associate justice of the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan on July 19923, 21992, to replace the retiring Lewis Powell.
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But Bork went through the entire nomination process before that happened, a process McConnell and current Republican leaders don't even want to start this year.
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Bork did so after Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus quit rather than obey Nixon's order to dismiss the special prosecutor.
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The seat intended for Robert Bork went eventually to Anthony M. Kennedy, who was to assume his own role in helping define a new mainstream.
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As retired Judge Richard Posner once said about Judge Robert Bork when the latter was nominated to the Supreme Court, judges are not potted plants.
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" But rather than a stiff artist's statement, Bork considers his work as projects that he "created from the cosmos and put on multi-monitor screens.
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This happened to Robert Bork in 1987, when public and media sentiment and senators' own judgment turned negative as Judge Bork's views became better known.
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In 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Bork to the Supreme Court, and his confirmation hearing proved to be the first test of originalism's public acceptability.
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"I hate to say this but this is worse than Robert Bork and I didn't think it could get any worse than that," Hatch said.
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Just after Kavanaugh was announced, I collected the final popularity ratings for all Supreme Court nominees since Robert Bork before their confirmation vote or withdrawal.
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Harriet Miers withdrew her nomination after being chosen by President George W. Bush, while Bork was voted down after being nominated by President Ronald Reagan.
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We come at this from different sides of the aisle but share the conviction that President Trump's Justice Department should issue modern-day Bork regulations.
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Before the hearings, a majority of Americans polled by the New York Times and CBS had no opinion of Bork one way or the other.
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From 1973 to 19873, Bork served as solicitor general of the United States, arguing cases before the Supreme Court on behalf of the federal government.
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Rahm Emanuel, who served in the Clinton White House during the impeachment, agrees that there is a risk that "we are going to normalize impeachment and it is going to have a cascading effect in the way Bork became a term," he said, referring to Robert H. Bork, the Supreme Court nominee rejected after a fiery 1987 hearing that inflames conservatives to this day.
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Ronald Reagan's nominee, Robert Bork, and Harriet Miers, George W. Bush's White House counsel and Supreme Court pick, did not make it through the acrimonious process.
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In fact, Justice Anthony Kennedy was approved in 1988, after a bruising battle in which the Senate rejected President Ronald Reagan's first nominee, conservative Robert Bork.
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And while on the D.C. Circuit, Bork ruled that it was fine for the United States Navy to discharge an officer solely because he was gay.
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Those numbers are lower than any other prospective justice in the past three decades other than Robert Bork, who was rejected by the Senate in 1987.
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In a town where tumbleweeds and rattlesnakes outnumber humans, Bork has found a niche to create a business that feeds his culinary and artistic communities alike.
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After Judge Bork was defeated in the Senate and a second choice later withdrew, Reagan tapped Anthony M. Kennedy, who ended up writing the Obergefell v.
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That case prompted a constitutional crisis that ended when Robert Bork, the solicitor general, acceded to Mr. Nixon's order and fired Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor.
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Progressives emerged from the Bork battle confident that the mainstream was theirs, that they had leveraged a constitutional consensus to defeat a nomination that threatened it.
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This learned helplessness reflects the tricky legacy of Robert Bork, an American scholar and judge who wrote "The Antitrust Paradox", a deeply influential book published in 1978.
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That era seemed to come to an end in 1987, with the defeat of the nomination of Justice Scalia's former colleague on the D.C. Circuit, Judge Bork.
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"There was a perception, and an accurate one, that he would play better on television than Judge Bork had," said Brad Berenson, a former Kennedy law clerk.
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I hate to say this but this is worse than [failed Supreme Court nominee] Robert Bork, and I didn't think it could get any worse than that.
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We're often running devices in beta mode without coming across any hitches but don't send us any angry emails if pre-release updates should bork your smartphone.
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Since the unsuccessful Republican effort to confirm President Ronald Reagan's nominee Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, abortion has been a central issue in confirmations.
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Surveys from several top outlets tell the same story: Americans are harshly split on Kavanaugh's nomination, to a degree not seen since Robert Bork in the 1980s.
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Cox wasn't fired until then-Solicitor General Robert Bork — later a failed nominee to the Supreme Court — agreed to do what the other two officials would not.
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With Nixon (and future Trump) henchman Roger Stone unavailable, Solicitor General Robert Bork was carted over to the White House by limousine to do Nixon's wet work.
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Overall only 37 percent of Americans believe that he should be confirmed, the lowest number since the failed confirmation of Robert Bork by Ronald Reagan in 1987.
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Bork, by nature, exuded an almost categorical — some would say arrogant — rejection of any judicial role in the articulation and defense of un-enumerated or implied rights.
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"Only two nominees have had weaker public support: Harriet Miers, who withdrew her nomination, in 2005; and Robert Bork, rejected by the Senate in 1987," pollsters concluded.
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Did the titanic battle that led to the defeat of Robert H. Bork, President Ronald Reagan's Supreme Court nominee, open the door to this kind of behavior?
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Interestingly, Bork did another thing after the firing: He rescinded the Department of Justice regulations establishing the procedures for appointing a special prosecutor in the first place.
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Leo said conservatives have borrowed techniques from the liberal coalitions that worked to defeat the nomination of Robert Bork by Republican then-President Ronald Reagan in 1987.
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At that time, Kavanaugh had the lowest level of support for a Supreme Court nominee since Robert Bork, whose nomination was rejected by the Senate in 1987.
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Robert Bork, an early adviser to the Federalist Society and an appeals court judge, had an answer: a return to the framers' original conception of the Constitution.
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Bork returned to the DC Circuit but resigned the following year, saying he wanted to speak out on public policy and against liberal activism in the courts.
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One is the Democratic Senate's successful effort in 1987 to derail President Ronald Reagan's appointment of Judge Robert Bork, a conservative jurist with controversial pro-life positions.
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The failure of Robert Bork also suggests that the president should avoid a nominee with a lengthy record of extremism, even if that nominee is exceptionally qualified.
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The four-point spread between those who support and those who oppose his nomination make him less popular than anyone since Robert Bork was nominated in 1987.
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BRIT HUME, FOX NEWS SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: It has been hardball politics on Supreme Court nominations at least since Bork, and arguably you can go back before that.
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At the time, the fact that he was largely unknown was seen as an advantage, particularly following President Ronald Reagan's botched attempt to confirm Robert Bork in 1987.
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No matter who takes Kennedy's place, the nominee will have a big robe to fill, and may face the resistance seen in the nominations of Bork and Thomas.
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The kind of judges that get appointed now are not the kind of judges, like in the Judge Bork days that were advocates for overturning Roe v. Wade.
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Those as confident and articulate in their opinions as Bork has been, so it was deemed, might as well have been handing sharp, pointy sticks to their opponents.
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The reflex is so ingrained that they have habituated multiple generations of journalists into asserting that Democrats filibustered Bork, President Ronald Reagan's nominee, when no such filibuster occurred.
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Democrats were frustrated in their effort to paint Thomas's views as outside the legal mainstream — the same strategy used four years before, in 1987, to block Robert Bork.
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But as Reagan learned with Bork, a candidate strongly favored by a narrow segment of the political spectrum does not always lead to smooth sailing on Capitol Hill.
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Another lesson: Nominees must have enough of a paper trail to ensure they aren't another Souter, but not so much of a trail that they become another Bork.
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Supreme Court nomination politics are even more polarized now, but the Senate is in GOP hands, even if only narrowly so, making a Bork debacle much less likely.
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Edward Kennedy famously launched the first salvo from the Senate floor as soon as the Reagan administration nominated Judge Robert Bork, an uncompromising conservative, for the Powell vacancy.
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This is an opportunity for a great event for this country: closing the book on the raucous hearings over the failed nomination of Judge Robert Bork in 1987.
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All of the nominees he mentions were given full hearings and a vote, and only one, Robert H. Bork, was rejected (with six Republicans voting to do so).
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If Justice Clarence Thomas had not confronted Senator Ted Kennedy and his fellow liberals during his confirmation with the word "lynching," he would have received the Bork treatment.
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Gore, Justice Brett Kavanaugh's recent testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Robert Bork hearing and the failure to give Merrick Garland even the courtesy of a hearing.
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And certainly we would be living in a much different constitutional universe had Robert Bork been sitting in the Supreme Court seat that went instead to Anthony Kennedy.
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According to several public opinion polls, taken before the latest allegation, public support for Kavanaugh's nomination is now lower than for any Supreme Court nominee since Robert Bork.
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The New York senator's implied threat is a resonant one, harking back to the titanic battle 30 years ago over President Ronald Reagan's nomination of Robert H. Bork.
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And had Bork been able to adequately explain his viewpoints to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and to America, through that lens, perhaps his nomination would have been successful.
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But Bork didn't, partly because his allies, like his old friend Antonin Scalia, told him he was so qualified for the position that he wouldn't need the preparation.
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On October 6, Bork was rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and on October 23, he was rejected by the Senate itself, by a vote of 58-42.
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And as best as we can tell, they succeeded — Kavanaugh was the least popular nominee on record, even less popular than failed nominees Robert Bork and Harriet Miers.
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And Republicans are benefiting from really focusing on this issue over the past two decades, but that was really because of what Democrats did to Robert Bork in &apos87.
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A conservative movement that cannot see the racism within Wax's commentary, or that of Robert Bork (who argued against a ban on literacy tests for voting), or of Rep.
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But pressure for a new special prosecutor was immense, and Bork and White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig recommended that Nixon pick the Texas Democratic lawyer Leon Jaworski.
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Expect critics and industry observers to watch closely, however, because years of promises and investigations have, let's say, strained trust in Facebook's ability to not completely bork things further.
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Northwestern University law professor Steven Lubet, who specializes in legal ethics, said that during the "Massacre," Bork rightly followed Nixon's order and tried to keep the Justice Department running.
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The plagiarism allegations arose as Biden oversaw the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for President Ronald Reagan's nominee to the Supreme Court Robert Bork, who was ultimately rejected by lawmakers.
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When it came to Bork, the senator proudly embraced a quote from one of the judge's lobbyists who said Specter scored the "game-winning RBI" to defeat Bork's nomination.
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Bork was deemed unfit by a bipartisan majority, and both Democrats and Republicans have rejected small numbers of individual lower court nominees on the basis of alleged ideological extremism.
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Nixon, in the Saturday Night Massacre, had to fire DOJ leaders one after one until he found an appointee—Solicitor General Robert Bork—who would dismiss the Watergate counsel.
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Still, the increasingly partisan and ideological nature of the confirmation process means that an obvious ideologue with a sterling résumé will still struggle to be confirmed (see: Bork, Robert).
|
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The Democrats mauled the character and record of Judge Bork, then they took after Judge Doug Ginsberg, and finally relented when Judge Anthony Kennedy was picked by President Reagan.
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Nine men and women have been confirmed to the Supreme Court in the nearly 29 years since the Senate rejected President Ronald Reagan's choice of Judge Robert H. Bork.
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The legal scholar Robert Bork was the most influential advocate for this view, and it soon guided the Supreme Court, the Reagan administration and pretty much every administration since.
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Mr. Bork is best known as the solicitor general who fired the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox and as a doomed Supreme Court nominee, not as an antitrust trailblazer.
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Kennedy's role as the swing vote means that most people remember the Bork hearings — and his nomination as Bork's replacement — as the hinge that led to Casey and Obergefell.
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The Senate's rejection in 1987 of Judge Robert H. Bork signaled a newfound focus on judicial philosophy and temperament, not merely a nominee's qualifications, as grounds for credible opposition.
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Both Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus refused to fire Cox, and both resigned from their positions in protest, leaving Bork as acting attorney general.
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" In 1991, a woman named Florynce Kennedy told a National Organization for Women conference that with regards to then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, "We're going to bork him.
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As the scandal threatened to engulf both his career and the Bork hearings, Biden hastily called a meeting of the Judiciary Committee and offered to step down as chair.
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Nixon's own attorney general and his successor resigned over principle after refusing to fire the Watergate special prosecutor, before Solicitor General Robert Bork stepped in to do the deed.
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Robert Bork was left to discharge that unhappy task, for which he paid a heavy political price 14 years later when he was denied a seat on the Supreme Court.
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At the time, the Justice Department's line of succession was only three deep: If Bork resigned too, it wasn't clear who would lead the department, and Richardson feared outright chaos.
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Back in 1973, Bork was the solicitor general, the person who represents federal government before the Supreme Court in what was then the No. 3 spot at the Justice Department.
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Leahy pushed back by pointing to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was confirmed on February 3, 1988 -- but only after Ronald Reagan's initial nominee, Robert Bork, was rejected by the Senate.
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The support for Kavanaugh, according to the poll, is lower than any other recent nominee except for Harriet Miers and Robert Bork — neither of whom were confirmed to the court.
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Both men refused to do so and instead resigned, causing the role of attorney general to fall to Solicitor General Robert Bork, who complied with Nixon's request and fired Cox.
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Conservatives are still bitter about the treatment of Robert Bork in 1987, such that "borking" remains in common usage, and the allegations Clarence Thomas faced from Anita Hill in 1991.
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Kavanaugh will join a small group of Supreme Court nominees that the ACLU has taken a stand against (the other three were William H. Rehnquist, Robert Bork, and Samuel Alito).
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Bork finished the nomination process so unpopular because Democrats and liberal groups went after him for his views on the Constitution, such as privacy and the right to an abortion.
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Senate Democrats voted unanimously to confirm Ronald Reagan's choice of Justice Scalia in 1986 and allowed full votes on Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, both of whom they strongly opposed.
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It is only by a distorted view of history that the Bork battle can be said to have ushered in or authorized flat-out obstruction of a Supreme Court nomination.
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And we conservatives have watched this the press have destroyed, they&aposre seeks to destroy Trump, Palin, Bork, Clarence Thomas, Ronald Reagan, the list goes on and on and on.
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The Federalist Society had been founded five years earlier by a handful of law students; Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, then a law professor, both spoke at its first symposium.
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Unfortunately, recent nominees by presidents of both parties have taken the wrong lesson from the Bork hearings, clamming up when asked even the most basic questions about their constitutional philosophy.
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Democrats lined up behind Senator Ted Kennedy in the greatest smear job in judicial nomination history using Bork's firing of Cox as the foundation of their successful opposition to Bork.
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Having lived through various firestorms over nomination battles—from Robert Bork to John Tower, from Clarence Thomas to Harriet Miers—this doesn&apost feel like it is rising to that level.
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In one of the stranger twists of nomination politics, Bork played a leading role in Miers' demise and Bush's alternate selection of appeals court judge Samuel Alito for the O'Connor seat.
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I think we have to look at this now, sadly, as a political turf war and fight as hard as possible as they do because they&aposre going to Bork everybody.
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Democratic presidential candidate Biden walks into the center of picketers against his plans to block the confirmation of nominated Supreme Court justice Robert Bork, July 11, 1987, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
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After the Senate defeated Reagan's first choice, conservative firebrand Robert Bork, and his second choice, Douglas Ginsburg, withdrew his nomination after the disclosure he had previously smoked marijuana, Kennedy was nominated.
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Congress passed the VPPA in 1988 in response to the Washington City Paper's publication of a list of videos that Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork rented at his local video store.
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He made it onto the Court in 21992 only because Reagan's first choice, Robert Bork, was "borked" by Senate Democrats and because Reagan's second choice, Douglas Ginsburg, admitted to smoking marijuana.
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When Justice Lewis Powell — a long-time swing vote on the Court — retired in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated the arch-conservative D.C. Circuit Judge Robert Bork to fill his seat.
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Thomas's nomination came only four years after the Senate rejected Ronald Reagan's selection of Robert Bork, a prominent conservative scholar whose views gave Democrats plenty of ammunition to sink his nomination.
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His first nominee, federal judge Robert Bork, while a favorite of conservatives, was so strongly opposed by moderates and liberals that the fight over confirmation turned into an unseemly political brawl.
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Smear /smeer/: noun Bork, Thomas, Hill, Clinton, Clinton, Beck, Imus, Palin, Biden, Obama, O'Reilly, Sanders, Trump, Hannity, Kavanaugh, Northam, Klobuchar, Carlson ... Smears have become a distasteful staple in our media diet.
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Bork for many years was a pariah in the profession — remember, he did not make it to the Supreme Court, so it's hard to say that he was a mainstream guy.
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The two nominees after Robert H. Bork were Anthony M. Kennedy and David H. Souter, not Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, who were nominated later by President Bill Clinton.
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Still, the battle over the Bork nomination is the memory Republican politicians and conservative commentators and interest groups reach for to justify the decision to block any Obama Supreme Court nominee.
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The Bork order contained much stronger provisions to protect the independence of the special prosecutor investigation than is now found in the Department of Justice guidelines that govern the Mueller inquiry.
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" Judge Robert H. Bork, whose nomination was rejected by the Senate in 1987, received a curious decision, with the majority calling him "well qualified," but four members saying he was "unqualified.
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He wrote on the Bork fight, Matters of Principle (Simon & Schuster 1992) and served as U.S. ambassador to Romania (2009-12) and currently practices law in Washington at Mayer Brown LLP.
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Strident partisanship, divisive rhetoric and incessant "paybacks" have marked the confirmation process for justices ever since the 1987 Senate rejection of Circuit Judge Robert Bork, President Ronald Reagan's Supreme Court nominee.
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He shot down a plan to ambush Bork with a recording of a speech he gave in 1985, insisting on sharing it with the judge before airing it in the committee.
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He shot down a plan to ambush Bork with a recording of a speech he gave in 1985, insisting on sharing it with the judge before airing it in the committee.
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Since the Senate's bipartisan rejection of Robert Bork in 1987, a generation of conservatives has come of age fuming about what might have been, about the "loss" of the Supreme Court.
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Senators concerned that a Justice Bork would turn back the clock on established civil and individual rights rejected his appointment by a solid majority made up of both Democrats and Republicans.
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Consider, for example, the extraordinary body of work of Steven G. Calabresi, who co-founded the Federalist Society in the early 1980s and then clerked for Judge Bork and Justice Scalia.
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The 1973 "Saturday Night Massacre" led to a constitutional crisis that ended when Robert H. Bork, the solicitor general, acceded to Mr. Nixon's order and fired Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor.
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Mr. Cox was fired by Robert H. Bork, the solicitor general, acting on orders from President Richard M. Nixon; it was not the case that "President Nixon himself fired Mr. Cox."
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In October 1973, Mr. Nixon's solicitor general, Robert H. Bork, submitted a court brief that similarly argued for an "inference" that the Constitution makes sitting presidents immune from indictment and trial.
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The book got a largely respectful reception, with Tom Wolfe, Robert Bork, and most strikingly Morton Halperin (then the ACLU's DC director and a fairly down-the-line liberal) providing blurbs.
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But there are obvious differences, too: The Bork nomination was torpedoed because Democrats found him to be an objectionable, extremist choice — not because they opposed any nominee from Reagan on principle.
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Acting in part under the intellectual influence of Robert Bork and the broader "law and economics" movement, the main currents of American legal thinking about antitrust matters shifted in the 1970s.
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Democrats (and six Republicans) blocked Bork, after fully considering his nomination, based on specific objections to his judicial temperament, not to deny President Ronald Reagan the ability to fill Supreme Court vacancies.
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When centrist Justice Lewis Powell announced his retirement in June 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated hardline conservative Judge Robert Bork of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
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Bork fired the Watergate special prosecutor in October 1973 after the attorney general and deputy attorney general at the time resigned rather than carry out President Nixon's orders to fire the prosecutor.
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What we did in Bork and Thomas, and there's a couple – because I wrote at the time, Haynsworth and Carswell before that, and when they went after – folks went after other justices.
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This is a huge break with the "Law and Economics" movement exemplified by Robert Bork and the University of Chicago, which sees concentration as acceptable as long as it benefits consumer welfare.
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Biden served as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during his decades on Capitol Hill, and presided over Supreme Court nominee hearings himself, including contentious meetings with Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.
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Instead of becoming a more inclusive society under Justice Kennedy, a confirmation of Judge Bork to the Supreme Court would have made the country a much more hostile place for many Americans.
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And it's worth noting that even very conservative legal scholars like Robert Bork have proposed this sort of system, which suggests this is something people across the ideological spectrum could get behind.
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Even when Democrats strongly opposed Republican nominees, like Robert Bork or Clarence Thomas, they still respected the president's right to make a nomination, and they held hearings and had a full vote.
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The urgent question that emerged from the ashes of Judge Bork's defeat and that awaited an answer as Justice Kennedy took his seat in February 1988 was: Who won the Bork battle?
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Although I would point out that the hyper-politicization of these confirmation hearings began in 1987 with the disgraceful Democratic mistreatment of Robert Bork, the Reagan nominee who should have been confirmed.
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They want to jam Kavanaugh down America's throat even though, as a CNN poll last month found, he has the "lowest public support since Robert Bork," whose nomination was rejected in 1987.
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For anyone who, like myself, is schooled in the antitrust jurisprudence of Judge Robert Bork, that merger is far more troubling and without major changes should not be allowed to go forward.
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In 113, Bolton joined the Reagan Justice Department; there, he helped shepherd the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork , whose ultimately unsuccessful bid began the era of fiercely partisan high-court nominations.
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In his 183 article, Judge Gorsuch seemed to trace the change in tone to the lingering aftermath of the Senate's 1987 rejection of President Ronald Reagan's nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork.
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"The lasting legacy of the Bork nomination was the unprecedented viciousness of the campaign to block him, which has been the standard for Supreme Court nominations ever since," writes Breitbart's Rebecca Mansour.
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Which brings us to Stan, who we now know is a Robert Bork apologist — if he's going to learn the truth about Philip and Elizabeth, it will be in the next nine episodes.
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I expect, and as I watched these hearings, it put me in mind of Ted Kennedy who in 1987 dredged up Robert Bork&aposs past history, his political history, working for Richard Nixon.
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Bork and filibusters Yet, as much as the prospect of a second seat may offer a president more options, the potential for an ideological mismatch and a bruising confirmation fight cannot be dismissed.
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Just 45 percent favor Gorsuch for the Court, the lowest level of public support for a Supreme Court nominee since the controversial nominations of Robert Bork (31 percent) and Harriet Miers (85033 percent).
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A data-driven study of Judge Kavanaugh's writing by Elliot Ash and David Chen found that his opinions and rhetoric were more extreme and polarizing than those of Judges Bork, Alito or Gorsuch.
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He co-authored a brief with failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork arguing that Hawaii violated the Constitution by permitting only Native Americans to vote in elections for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs.
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Pushed by the conservative jurist Robert Bork, whose 1978 Antitrust Paradox is enormously influential, the argument is simple: Economic concentration is only bad if consumers suffer, usually in the form of higher prices.
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"Instead the Republican master strategists let themselves be trapped in absurd debates about whether, under Emperor Bork, you would be able to buy condoms in Connecticut," National Review's editors fumed after the vote.
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According to a CNN poll released on Thursday, only 37 percent of Americans think the Senate should confirm his nomination, making him the most unpopular Supreme Court nominee since Robert Bork in 1987.
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He may be less moderate than Kennedy, but he is not as incendiary as a Robert Bork, whose nomination failed in 1987 at the hands of a Democratic Senate, led by Ted Kennedy.
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The Supreme Court's ruling handing the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush cannot be squared with the original understanding of the Constitution, and Bork was was highly critical of the court's reasoning.
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Scalia was the group's first faculty adviser at Chicago, where he was then a professor; the adviser at Yale was Robert Bork, who was later nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan.
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"It started in 1987, when Senate Democrats launched an all-out assault against the nomination of Judge Robert Bork," Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said on the Senate floor earlier this month.
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The bitterness began when liberal senators attempted to savage the reputation of Judge Robert Bork in a campaign of character assassination led by Mr. Biden, who then was chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
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Cox was fired by the solicitor general, Robert Bork, igniting an outcry over the Watergate scandal that eventually forced Nixon to resign in August 1974 rather than face removal from office by Congress.
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It is easy to imagine several 5-4 decisions, like a 1992 ruling that affirmed the right to abortion, going the other way had Bork been on the bench instead of Justice Kennedy.
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In the Book Review, the legal scholar Ronald Dworkin wrote that Simon offered a "thoughtful, modest and shrewd appraisal" of his and the Senate's performance during the nomination hearings for Thomas and Bork.
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An August poll conducted for CNN showed that only 37 percent of Americans supported Kavanaugh's confirmation, making him the least popular nominee since Robert Bork, who was nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1987.
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No participant in the Bork battle could plausibly have maintained, for example, that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a gun, as the Supreme Court would decide two decades later.
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Bork did fire Cox, and though he had planned to resign immediately after doing so, he said that Richardson and Ruckelshaus had urged him to stay for the good of the Justice Department.
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Bork explained his actions that night on multiple occasions, including in a posthumous memoir published in 2013, where he revealed that Nixon suggested he would be rewarded with a seat on the Supreme Court.
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In 1973, Nixon's AG and deputy AG both refused to fire Cox, so Nixon fired the former and saw the latter resign before he got Solicitor General Robert Bork to carry out the order.
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In the former case, Solicitor General Robert Bork concluded that Vice President Spiro Agnew could be prosecuted by US Attorney for the District of Maryland George Beall for accepting bribes as governor of Maryland.
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Mr. Calabresi served as a Law Clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court, and he also clerked for U.S. Court of Appeals Judges Robert H. Bork and Ralph K. Winter.
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But as strange as it may seem to someone not immersed in the current antitrust world, the "Rube Goldberg" economic model presented by the government actually reflects advances in economics since the Bork era.
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Mr. Calabresi served as a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court, and he also clerked for U.S. Court of Appeals Judges Robert H. Bork and Ralph K. Winter.
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The late Robert Bork argued that Congress should be allowed to veto an act of the Supreme Court and that if that were a failure, it would at least be a failure of democracy.
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That probably sounded better as Ted Kennedy's tirade against Robert Bork in 22019 — the failed nomination which eventually produced Justice Kennedy — but, regardless, it betrays a simplistic and demagogic view of our judicial branch.
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The third in command at the Justice Department, Solicitor General Robert Bork (whom Ronald Reagan would later try and fail to appoint to the Supreme Court), finally carried out the order to fire Cox.
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The resulting public outcry forced Nixon to agree that he would let Bork appoint another special counsel and would not fire this one without the concurrence of a group of eight members of Congress.
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The Thomas and Robert Bork hearings were the prelude to the contentious and partisan confirmation process that we are now witnessing in the politicization of President Obama's latest appointment by the Senate Republican leadership.
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A Jones nomination would most likely have engendered a "horrendous fight" reminiscent of the battle over President Ronald Reagan's nomination of Judge Robert Bork, whom the Senate had rejected less than three years earlier.
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Mr. Whitaker or whoever becomes the next acting attorney general must provide the same protections against interference that Mr. Bork provided to the special Watergate prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, in a 1973 Justice Department order.
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Mr. McGahn said he did not want to be "Saturday Night Massacre Bork," referring to Robert H. Bork's role in the firing of Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor, on orders from Mr. Nixon.
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When centrist conservative Justice Lewis Powell announced his retirement in June 22018, Republican President Ronald Reagan chose Robert Bork, then a judge on a prominent US appeals court in Washington (where Kavanaugh now sits).
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The appeals court was known as a liberal bench, but after Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency, it became notably more conservative with new appointees, including Robert H. Bork, Kenneth Starr and Antonin Scalia.
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According to the Congressional Research Service, the longest the Senate has taken to act on a Supreme Court nomination since 1975 was that of Robert H. Bork, who was rejected 108 days after being selected.
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Every so often a viral video comes along that has the ability to change the world as we know it, and Gabe's bork cover of Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" is definitely one of them.
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But just as Bork then appointed another special prosecutor to take Cox's place, so any justice-department official who agrees to remove Mr Mueller would have to name another to keep the Russia investigation going.
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To put that in historical context, CNN found that Kavanaugh had the lowest support for his confirmation since Bork — one of two Supreme Court nominees in the past 30 years who had their nominations withdrawn.
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John Warner, who voted against Bork, came anywhere close to Collins' record and he still voted with his party 9 points less of the time (78%) in the 100th Congress than Collins did in 2017.
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Last year, I fine-tuned a model that tries to explain the factors behind how each lawmaker voted in Senate confirmations since Bork and then tries predicting how Supreme Court future confirmation votes will go.
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McConnell called the attacks on Kavanaugh an "extreme" distortion of his record and compared it to the successful effort to block Robert Bork, who was nominated by President Reagan to the Supreme Court in 85033.
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But its fiercest advocate, the rejected Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, knew how to make it seductive to legal minds, offering a simple theory that allowed judges to make decisions with apparent precision and rigor.
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As for my second concession: Anyone old enough to remember Judge Robert H. Bork's confirmation battle in 1987 will not have forgotten the anti-Bork television commercial narrated by Hollywood's icon of probity, Gregory Peck.
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Republicans said they were offended by the Democratic tactics and saw it is a continuation of Democratic character assassination of Supreme Court candidates nominated by Republican presidents, beginning with Judge Robert H. Bork in 1987.
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"This is the latest escalation in the left's never-ending judicial war, the most audacious yet," Mr. McConnell said, after describing Democratic opposition in the past to Judge Robert H. Bork and Justice Clarence Thomas.
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The Bork hearings taught us all that it matters, as a matter of politics and public opinion, that the individuals to be confirmed for life-tenured positions thought women's bodies and jobs merited law's protection.
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That was when Robert H. Bork, a federal appellate judge named to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan, testified expansively and combatively as he expounded his conservative judicial philosophy at his Senate confirmation hearing.
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Judge Wald once clashed with Judge Bork over the constitutionality of a Washington statute that prohibited protesters from being within 500 feet of an embassy but that allowed favorable demonstrators to gather inside that perimeter.
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Robert Bork, a former federal judge and conservative legal theorist, argued in his 1978 book, "The Antitrust Paradox," that if the government protected weaker competitors, it would make businesses less efficient, raising prices for consumers.
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It was a nomination process so contentious that it inspired a new verb, "to bork," defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as: To obstruct (someone, especially a candidate for public office) through systematic defamation or vilification.
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But it has happened eight times in the last half-century, through the kind of Senate combat that led to the 20 defeat of Robert Bork and administration missteps like the 258 case of Harriet Miers.
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When you're dealt a losing hand on the Supreme Court in the post-Bork era in which confirmations are party-line affairs, about the best you can do is make some noise and raise some cash.
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Of the past ten nominees, the seven who were elevated to the court led in such polls by double-digit margins; neither of the two who had narrower margins, Robert Bork and Harriet Miers, achieved confirmation.
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But since 22013, when Ronald Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork, an outspoken conservative, received a chilly reception from Senate Democrats (he was defeated by a vote of 58-42), the process has become much more heated.
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In recent decades, especially since the controversial treatment of one of President Reagan's nominees, Robert Bork, presidents of both parties have sought to increase the impact of their Supreme Court picks by nominating relatively young jurists.
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For Republicans, it usually dates to John F. Kennedy stealing the 1960 election from Nixon in Chicago, followed by the "soft coup" of Watergate, the crucifixion of Robert Bork, and the subsequent "borking" of Clarence Thomas.
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Members of both chambers should demand, including in oversight or other hearings, a commitment, given under oath, from any new person overseeing the Mueller investigation to protect the investigation along the lines of the Bork protections.
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A number of Democratic and Republican members of Congress have spoken out about the importance of allowing Mr. Mueller to complete his work without interference, and the Bork solution is the logical means to that end.
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If only one or two justices had been different — a Robert Bork rather than an Anthony Kennedy, an "anybody else" rather than a David Souter — then, it is imagined, we would inhabit a different constitutional universe.
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Earlier, he was a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, who died last year, and Judge Robert H. Bork of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who died in 2012.
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As chief counsel for then-Senator Biden and the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee when President Reagan nominated Scalia and Judge Robert Bork, I had a unique vantage point over the direction of the Court.
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In 1987, Democrats who controlled the Senate gave Robert Bork, former President Ronald Reagan's controversial nominee, an up-or-down vote on the floor even after the Judiciary Committee voted 9-85033 to reject his nomination.
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He was nominated by Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1987 and confirmed by the Senate in 1988 after Democrats thwarted Reagan's first choice, outspoken conservative Robert Bork, and his second pick, Douglas Ginsburg, withdrew from consideration.
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Unlike Robert Bork, President Ronald Reagan's failed Supreme Court nominee in 1987, Kavanaugh is more polished and less polemical, which will make it much more difficult for Democrats to paint him as a right-wing zealot.
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On July 1, 1987, Ted Kennedy, then a senator and a leading light within the Democratic Party, took to the Senate floor to denounce Robert Bork, whom Ronald Reagan had just nominated for the Supreme Court.
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And hell-bent on preventing Robert Bork from becoming a Supreme Court justice, Senate Democrats engaged in one of the most disgusting smear campaigns which culminated on the Senate floor, with outright lies from Senator Ted Kennedy.
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The solicitor general, Robert Bork, weighed in on the issue in October 1973 with the same take: The President's immunity rests not only upon the matters just discussed but also upon this unique constitutional position and powers.
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In 1982, spurred by the theories of Friedman and Bork, Ronald Reagan gutted the federal government's enforcement of antitrust laws, unleashing a massive merger boom in everything from airlines, retail, and oil to packaged goods and manufacturing.
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Kennedy became a justice only after President Ronald Reagan's failed nomination of Robert Bork, followed by Douglas Ginsburg's admission of past drug use that resulted in his withdrawal from consideration for a seat on the High Court.
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But others worry that natural law will become an unwelcome distraction during Gorsuch's Senate confirmation hearings, as it was during those of Robert Bork and Justice Clarence Thomas, both of whom expressed their appreciation for the field.
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Kennedy's joining the court was made possible only because the Senate first famously rejected Robert Bork, President Ronald Reagan's initial nominee and a staunch conservative, to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, considered a moderate conservative.
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In what came to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre, the deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, also resigned before the order was carried by out by the Justice Department's next-in-line, Solicitor General Robert Bork.
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Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. had retired and President Reagan appointed Robert Bork, a judge on the D.C. Circuit best known for his role in Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre" when he fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox.
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My dad was waylaid a little bit from his passion for antitrust, but he was also, he testified against Robert Bork as a small businessman, and it was something that he just always remained really passionate about.
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"They made a term for it: Borked," said the Republican staffer, a reference to Robert Bork, who's nomination was squashed by Senate Democrats three decades ago -- ultimately paving the way for Justice Anthony Kennedy to join the court.
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That was a view of antitrust that reigned until the 1960s when Judge Robert Bork, he of that funky beard, wrote an article saying that the reason we have antitrust laws is because we care about consumer welfare.
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How exactly they can accomplish that—and just which Justice Department official is willing to add his or her name to the history books to stand alongside Robert Bork, the executioner in Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre"—is unclear.
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Maybe it could have persisted had Senate Democrats played a longer game, but only temporarily; however the Senate voted on Neil Gorsuch, the same forces that doomed Robert Bork and Merrick Garland would have doomed the filibuster hereafter.
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Bork, a former Yale law professor and US solicitor general, had an extensive record as a conservative legal thinker, and Democrats, who had just reclaimed a Senate majority in the 22000 elections, mounted a fierce campaign against him.
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As allegations of sexual assault and misconduct swirl around Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, many conservatives are deeply concerned that Kavanaugh is being "Borked" — a reference to the failed 1987 nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.
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You can go back to [Ronald Reagan nominee Robert] Bork for a nomination that was very much focused on what kind of a justice he was going to be, what kind of rulings he was going to make.
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If you look at his record on Supreme Court nominees you will see who he's fought for — Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg — and who he's fought against — Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito.
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I actively worked in favor of the confirmation of Elena Kagan, wrote in support of Stephen Breyer, and testified in support of Robert Bork, so I do not think these comments will be read as one-sided or partisan.
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So if you are really going to be true to the spirit of Bork in the sense of injecting advances in economics into antitrust law, these economic models deserve more attention and less skepticism than the judge gave them.
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It's called Bork to the Future—a made-for-TV spectacle in which a well-qualified nominee for the Supreme Court faces the same disgraceful treatment from Democrats that a similarly qualified nominee faced more than thirty years ago.
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Down to defeat went Bork, the victim of a Democrat majority in the Senate, followed by an abortive second nomination, which went up in smoke after the revelation that that the appointee had smoked pot with his law students.
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Thirty-one years ago, in response to Ronald Reagan's nomination of Judge Bork to the Supreme Court, Ted Kennedy took to the Senate floor to prophesy the horrors that would ensue in "Robert Bork's America" were the nominee confirmed.
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In all four of our case studies, and undoubtedly in countless others, a court with a Justice Bork would have ruled in ways that would have reduced the significance of the Supreme Court and enhanced the role of legislatures.
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We need, now more than ever, the sort of justice that Robert Bork promised to be, a justice who would enforce the Constitution and laws as they are, and not as he or she might wish them to be.
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When he's not prepping for lunch service at the Food Shark or serving grilled cheeses into the wee hours of the morning at the parlour, Bork relaxes at home in his geodesic dome, the haven for his video art.
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Robert Bork and judges, scholars, and regulators working in his intellectual tradition argued that the point of antitrust policy was to "protect competition, not competitors," and alleged that earlier cohorts of antitrust enforcers had been overly skeptical of mergers.
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Although overall Kennedy was more likely to side with the conservatives than the liberals in his 30 years on the court, there were many areas where he was notably more liberal than Bork would have been as a justice.
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Justice Kennedy turned out to be the non-Bork, voting to preserve the right to abortion and writing a series of gay-rights rulings that culminated with the 2015 decision that announced a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
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In 1987, Judge Robert H. Bork, a Supreme Court nominee of Ronald Reagan's who ultimately did not get confirmed, was questioned extensively about his role in dismissing Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor who was investigating President Richard M. Nixon.
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Instead, the Kavanaugh nomination will now join the Supreme Court fights over the nominations of Robert H. Bork, Clarence Thomas and Merrick B. Garland as flash points in Senate history, ones that left deep wounds and bitterness that persist.
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That was the case with Judge Robert Bork, a Reagan nominee whose skepticism about the Constitution's protection of privacy and liberty convinced a majority of senators that he was simply too far right of the mainstream to be confirmed.
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Judge Bork was "out of the mainstream" and would "turn back the clock" on civil rights, his opponents charged as they succeeded in marshaling a bipartisan coalition that defeated his nomination with 42 votes in favor and 58 against.
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Here, conservatives will have a strong retort: Not only was Anthony Kennedy nominated in 1987 — not 1988 — but the only reason he was nominated at all was because Democrats had rejected the nomination of Robert Bork a year earlier.
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But there was even more to Bork's story, which came up during his nomination hearings and played into both how Bork was perceived by the public and the ultimate failure of his nomination: his involvement in the Watergate scandal.
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Bork had published a number of academic articles prior to going on the DC circuit in which he had been strongly critical of lots of Supreme Court precedents, and he went so far as to name some of them.
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Some nominations toppled after Senate opponents depicted the jurists as a serious threat to civil rights and racial equality, as with Reagan nominee Bork, or earlier, President Richard Nixon's choices of Clement Haynsworth in 20 and G. Harrold Carswell in 22005.
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Senate Democrats need to use their time on the floor to make much tougher statements about what they believe to be wrong with Sessions, the kind of attacks that Senator Ted Kennedy unleashed against Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in 1987.
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In the so-called Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, Richard Nixon fired two justice-department officials before a third (Robert Bork, the solicitor general) finally agreed to write the letter firing Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal.
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Vice President Joe Biden, who presided over the contentious Supreme Court fights involving Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, said he never denied any nominee a vote — unlike Senate Republicans, who are denying President Barack Obama's Supreme Court choice, Merrick Garland.
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Scalia and Judges Robert Bork, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, George MacKinnon and Spotswood W. Robinson III hit upon a plan to take care of Terry Ross and me, and we were invited to be clerks for a few cases to each.
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He also rejected the parents' claims under the Video Privacy Protection Act, a 1988 law adopted a year after a newspaper wrote about movies rented by failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, based on a list provided by a video store.
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And there's an interesting ... Generally, my argument is we've got to really rethink our whole antitrust approach to be much more aggressive, where at the moment the whole approach is based on this notion that was really introduced by Robert Bork.
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This eagle-eyed focus was not only economically efficient, Bork and his followers pointed out, but easy for courts to administer, because consumer welfare could be measured in terms of prices: If prices are going down, the system is working.
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The usual left issue advocacy groups have predictably lined up against Kavanaugh, with all the predictable exaggerations about his record and the same tired chicken little prognostications that they have made about every Republican Supreme Court nominee since Robert Bork.
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"When I have down time, I'm working on something called The Marfa Mystery Channel," Bork's "TV channel" which includes footage of Bork and a friend going head-to-head in vintage car chases, caught on tape with go-pro cameras.
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WASHINGTON — The bitter partisan fury that engulfed Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation was the fiercest battle in a political war over the judiciary that has been steadily intensifying since the Senate rejected Judge Robert H. Bork in 1987.
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The seat intended for Judge Bork — the seat that had been occupied for 15 years by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., an appointee of President Richard Nixon and the "swing" justice of his time — went eventually to Anthony M. Kennedy.
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I've channeled it myself, writing it more times than I'd like to count about how the Bork confirmation hearing became the equivalent of a national constitutional teach-in that provided the country with a working definition of the constitutional mainstream.
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In 1999, Mr. Kavanaugh was a co-author on an amicus brief in support of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a group that opposes affirmative action, with Robert H. Bork, who was openly critical of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
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President Ronald Reagan's nomination of Judge Bork in 1987 drew bitter opposition from liberal groups and Democratic lawmakers who anticipated that if he were confirmed, the court would tilt to the right on key issues like free speech, religion and abortion.
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It's possible that structural forces — the ideological sorting of the parties, the decay of the republic toward an executive-judicial diarchy — were always going to push the filibuster to extinction, no matter whether Bork was Borked or Garland pocket-vetoed.
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In his testimony, Judge Bork seemed oblivious to the fact that while the rich were able to go out of state to get birth control pills, Connecticut's law meant that a clinic for poor women could not provide birth control.
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But Robert H. Bork, the United States solicitor general and the acting attorney general after the dismissal of his two superiors, carried out the presidential order, not only firing Mr. Cox but also abolishing the office of the special Watergate prosecutor.
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Judge Bork wrote for the majority upholding the law, but her dissenting argument, that it violated the principle that any restrictions on political speech had to be content-neutral, was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Finzer v. Barr.
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It comes out of a forgotten part of the story, which came in the wake of President Richard Nixon's so-called Saturday Night Massacre: President Trump and his Justice Department should follow the path of none other than Robert Bork.
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Republicans had used the tactic with unprecedented frequency while in the minority to slow or block Mr. Obama's nominees as part of a tit-for-tat dating to 1987, when Senate Democrats rejected Reagan's nomination of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court.
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Yet conservatives have not been without internal rivalries over who was best for the high court at a particular moment, such as when Antonin Scalia beat out Robert Bork for the 1986 nomination and John Roberts prevailed over Michael Luttig in 2005.
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Still, Kennedy&aposs retirement will likely trigger a confirmation battle the likes of which hasn't been seen since the hotly contested nominations of Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork ... President Trump's previous pick, Neil Gorsuch, was confirmed in a fairly close 54-45 vote.
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Robert Bork&aposs 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&apos doors in midnight raids, and schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution.
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The champion of this view was [conservative legal scholar] Robert Bork, and his basic argument was that a lot of what looks like evil or malicious conduct — the so-called "bad guys" — may be very economically efficient and therefore good for the economy.
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"Blurred thoughts and the emotion of the moment" Bork, who died in 2012, was constantly challenged on whether he steadied the Justice Department amid a constitutional crisis, as he insisted, or simply acquiesced to a president caught in the vice of Watergate.
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At the University of Chicago, the emerging group of conservative thinkers known as the Chicago School, which produced economists and lawyers such as Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Robert Bork, rebelled against what they perceived as the socialism of the New Deal.
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Vox's Timothy Lee explained: Here, conservatives will have a strong retort: Not only was Anthony Kennedy nominated in 1987 — not 1988 — but the only reason he was nominated at all was because Democrats had rejected the nomination of Robert Bork a year earlier.
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A former New Hampshire Supreme Court nominee who had decided few cases with national implications, served as a federal judge for less than a year, and written virtually no revealing articles seemed to be the ideal nominee in the post-Bork era.
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The confirmation process became a referendum on the constitutional status quo; as brilliantly formulated by the Bork opposition, the question was whether the public wanted to "turn back the clock" on women's rights and the hard-won achievements of the civil rights movement.
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For decades, thanks largely to the influence of Robert Bork and the Chicago school of economics, and then to regulators of both parties, antitrust law has been seldom enforced, and only on the basis of a Supreme Court-dictated "consumer welfare" standard.
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That makes public support for him the lowest for any Supreme Court pick since Robert Bork was nominated by President Reagan in 2900, according to CNN, which cited polls from the network, USA Today and Gallup dating back to Bork's nomination for comparison.
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The first, Robert Bork, was voted down for the good reason of being an extremist loon; the second, Douglas Ginsburg, withdrew his own name from consideration for the hilarious reason that he smoked pot sometimes in his 20s and it was scandalous.
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His spokesman, Bill Russo, said the former vice president is a supporter of the Roe decision who fought to protect abortion rights by mounting a fierce opposition to the nomination of a conservative judge, Robert H. Bork, to the Supreme Court in 21998.
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Former Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork previously had the least amount of support in the poll's history, recording a six-point advantage over those who wanted to see his nomination fail when he was first announced in 2628, which it eventually did.
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Justice Anthony M. Kennedy is a target of that anger because he ended up in the seat intended for Judge Bork, from which he cast crucial votes to preserve the right to abortion and recognize a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
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The lingo is characterized by cutesy nicknames for dogs (Samoyeds are "floofs" or "clouds," corgis are "loaves," any huge fluffy dog is a big boofin' woofer) and onomatopoeia (a doggo can "bork," or stick their tongues out and do a "blep" or "mlem").
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In this highly partisan environment in which potential justices are far less likely to reveal their stances on matters of judicial importance than they were back when Bork was under consideration, it seems unlikely, however, that Kavanaugh's public numbers would move that much.
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The first came in 1971, when President Richard Nixon initially nominated William Rehnquist to the bench, then again in 1987, when President Ronald Reagan tapped Robert Bork and, most recently, in 2006 when it opposed President George W. Bush nominee Samuel Alito.
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Before serving on the court, Bork, a graduate of the University of Chicago and a former Marine, had taught law at Yale Law School, where his students would include both Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as Anita Hill and future California Gov.
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In January 2001, the New York Times even featured a chart of "likely borkees and their probable score on the bork-o-meter," referring to potential nominees for high-level positions within the Bush administration (John Ashcroft, for instance, received nine Borks).
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Then there were Reagan's two failed attempts to fill a Supreme Court vacancy — Robert Bork was blocked by Senate Democrats who viewed him as too far-right, and Douglas Ginsburg withdrew his name from consideration when it was reported he had smoked pot.
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Reich has a stunningly impressive CV — Rhodes scholar, assistant to US Solicitor General Robert Bork, director of policy planning at the Federal Trade Commission under President Jimmy Carter, co-founder of the American Prospect — and we had no shortage of things to discuss.
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Since 28, when a Democratic Senate rejected Robert H. Bork, President Ronald Reagan's nominee to replace Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., for his unapologetic far-right views, presidents have often played it safe by nominating innocuous-seeming federal judges, with short or bland paper trails.
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For Your Only-On-Facebook Friends We've all got those friends we've only met once IRL and then just exchange happy birthday greetings back and forth for years.... Much Bork So Birthday For your loved one that sends you dog memes literally all day.
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You realize that there was a guy between Robert Bork and Justice Kennedy that Reagan nominated who couldn&apost get through and it was Ginsburg - Judge Ginsburg who couldn&apost make it onto the court because they found out he had smoked pot once.
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Reagan made his mark on the court with the appointment of eight conservative jurists in the 21926s, including Bork; Antonin Scalia, later elevated to the Supreme Court; and Ken Starr, who later became Whitewater independent counsel and triggered the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
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He was at least "part of the reason," he said, for the following events in American history: the confirmation of Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor; the non-confirmation of Judge Robert H. Bork; and the Iran nuclear deal.
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That view only began to change after the financial crisis: In 2010, journalist and scholar Barry Lynn published Cornered, the first serious attempt in decades to reassess the prevailing wisdom on antitrust, as laid out in the 1970s by the conservative scholar Robert Bork.
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The senators questioned Judge Bork extensively about his academic writing, his speeches and his opinions for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to which President Reagan had appointed him (along with Antonin Scalia) as a justice-in-waiting.
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It's possible today, a generation later, to see a playing out of the Bork battle, carried on by those too young to have taken part back in 1987 but who came of age in the belief that their hero was dealt a mighty injustice.
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In 1971, Robert H. Bork, then a prominent conservative law professor and later a federal judge and Supreme Court nominee, wrote that the First Amendment should be interpreted narrowly in a law-review article that remains one of the most-cited of all time.
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It was perhaps the most audacious escalation in a series of precedent-busting Senate skirmishes in recent decades — tracing from Democratic opposition to Judge Robert H. Bork and Justice Clarence Thomas to the wide-scale use of the filibuster by Republicans under Mr. Obama.
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The poisonous partisan divide in this country dates back to the Robert Bork Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1987, and has been fed since then by the enduring conceit of liberals that only they have received wisdom, and all other thought is politically incorrect.
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Biden, meanwhile, struggled at times to come up with answers to Supreme Court-related questions that didn't name-check Robert Bork — a failed Supreme Court nominee from more than 30 years ago who likely isn't going to register with a wide swath of the electorate.
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With doubts sown about Nixon's commitment to the rule of law, Bork devised a solution that brought the branches of government together; rather than waiting for Congress to regulate the firing of prosecutors, he seized the initiative and invited Congress in from the start.
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But many on the right, including those who laughed at Kennedy's doom-and-gloom portrayal of the nominee, widely underestimated just how much liberals would fight back against Bork's nomination; to them, the mere idea of Bork on the Court was a terrifying one.
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" On the First Amendment, Bork wrote in 21987 that the Constitution only protects political speech, adding, "There is no basis for judicial intervention to protect any other form of expression, be it scientific, literary or that variety of expression we call obscene or pornographic.
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"Punishing Google for being a successful competitor would stifle innovation and dynamic competition," concluded the late Robert Bork, long the Chicago school's leading antitrust expert, in a paper published in 2012 (commissioned by Google, which needed ammunition to defend itself in an antitrust investigation at the time).
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Judge Andrew Napolitano explains on 'America's Newsroom' Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy's announcement that he will retire from the Supreme Court on July 20163 will likely trigger a confirmation battle the likes of which hasn't been seen since the hotly contested nominations of Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork.
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The first scene in Confirmation, HBO's film about the 1991 Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, is grainy news footage: Robert Bork is nominated to the Supreme Court then rejected by the Senate; Thurgood Marshall announces his retirement and George H.W. Bush prepares to announce a successor.
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The prevailing opinion was expressed in a 1973 memo by President Richard Nixon's Solicitor General, Robert Bork, who argued that then-Vice President Spiro Agnew could face charges stemming from his time as governor of Maryland, but that a president could only be charged after leaving office.
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If the populists gain more momentum, they have a ways to go to unseat the antitrust establishment, which still hews to the consumer welfare standard developed by Robert Bork, the influential legal scholar and judge, and scholars at the University of Chicago beginning in the 1970s.
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Judge Robert Bork, whose nomination to the Supreme Court the Senate rejected three decades ago, became a martyr to the cause of originalism because he believed in the courts' demotion in the constitutional scheme from the inflated role they had assumed under Chief Justice Earl Warren.
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In what became known as the "Saturday Night Massacre," both he and Attorney General Elliot Richardson stepped down rather than carry out then-President Nixon's order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, with the next most-senior DOJ official, Solicitor General Robert Bork, eventually firing Cox.
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Retro Report, a series of video documentaries that examine major news stories of the past and their lasting consequences, looks back at the Bork hearing as the Senate Judiciary Committee prepares on Monday to consider President Trump's nomination of Judge Neil M. Gorsuch to the Court.
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But if "to Bork" means to derail a divisive nominee's candidacy through a sustained attack on the candidate's record, then "to Garland" surely means to kill a respected nominee's chances by simply letting him linger in limbo, virtually ignoring him while refusing to consider his candidacy.
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Mark Gitenstein, a top aide on the Judiciary Committee, feared that Mr. Biden's flagging reputation might imperil the Senate vote if he did not end his candidacy: "If we win Bork, it will be in spite of us," he told Mr. Biden, according to Mr. Biden's book.
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The reasoning behind Bork's judicial rulings and viewpoints is straightforward and, to many conservatives, extremely logical: Bork was a constitutional originalist who believed that the Constitution and the laws it set in place should be interpreted the same way they were when the document was first written.
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I mean, really, somebody said to me at one point -- maybe I said it to myself -- the last... (LAUGHTER) LIEBERMAN: The last Supreme Court nominee who really let it all out there and said exactly what he believed was my former law school professor, the late Robert Bork.
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But if, on the other hand, Justice Kennedy turned out to embrace a constitutional vision notably more inclusive than Judge Bork's, if he rejected Judge Bork's doctrinaire originalism, then the scorched-earth Bork battle would be deemed worthwhile and the liberal side would be seen to have prevailed.
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Vice President Gerald R. Ford assumed the presidency, Mr. Cox returned to teaching at Harvard, Mr. Richardson was named Mr. Ford's commerce secretary in 1976, and Mr. Bork became a federal judge whose nomination to the Supreme Court by President Reagan in 1987 was defeated in the Senate.
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But an epoch of unrelieved mutual suspicion between competitors — and especially between Republicans and Democrats — took hold somewhere on a timeline that runs through Watergate; the confirmation hearings of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas; the serial investigations into the Clintons; and Mitch McConnell's vow to thwart President Obama at every turn.
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The unorthodox news conference highlighted the extent to which the battle over Judge Garland's nomination — unlike past confirmation fights such as those involving Justice Clarence Thomas or Judge Robert Bork — will play out not in televised committee hearings or debate on the Senate floor, but in the court of public opinion.
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Everyone have to listen to Ronald Reagan, follow Ronald Reagan, and in the end, the politics completely reversed and the good political vote was to vote against Bork because the case had been made against him, the country rose up and he was beaten by a -- Democrats and Republicans voting against him.
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It was later revealed that the attack on her was part of a conservative reaction to the doomed Robert Bork nomination, and it's a reminder that in the '90s, conservatives understood that the terms of the debate around race had shifted and they could only attack "diversity" through their own versions of diversity.
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Kennedy — one of the masterminds of the scathing attacks on Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas — would be proud of his shameless successors, who will likely gin up more accusations and demand further investigation until they can push the process past the November vote, when they hope to have more leverage.
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Conservatives, needless to say, have their own laundry list of norm-breaking by Democrats, frequently starting with the successful campaign to keep Robert Bork off the Supreme Court and continuing through the Obama administration's attempted expansion of the traditional executive prerogative of prosecutorial discretion to grant work permits to millions of undocumented immigrants.
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In one of his many political comments on Thursday, Judge Kavanaugh said he had been subjected to a "good, old-fashioned attempt at Borking" — referring to the failed 1987 Supreme Court nomination of Judge Robert Bork that is seared in the minds of conservatives who believe their champion was unfairly attacked by Democrats.
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That possibility has historical precedent: In "Saturday Night Massacre" in 1973, President Richard M. Nixon fired the attorney general and his deputy because they were unwilling to remove the Watergate special prosecutor, stopping only when the official next in line, Solicitor General Robert Bork, was willing to do what the president wanted.
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Following the Saturday Night Massacre — the now-infamous dismissal of the special prosecutor Archibald Cox by Robert H. Bork, then the acting attorney general — several members of Congress sued in federal court because the Cox firing made it more difficult to perform their duty in deciding whether to proceed with a Nixon impeachment.
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Steven Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern who clerked for both Scalia and Bork and helped found the Federalist Society, looked at all the early state constitutions and found that Scalia had cited the ones that included a personal right to bear arms without acknowledging that a majority of the constitutions did not.
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Republicans trawling for White House hypocrisy might have also taken exception to Obama's Rose Garden announcement itself -- since Biden -- a key player in obstructionist Supreme Court confirmation fights in the past, including his orchestration of the rejection of President Ronald Reagan pick Judge Robert Bork -- stood alongside the President as he made his speech.
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Bork had extraordinary credentials as a legal scholar and federal judge, but the Senate, after hearings that rose, in the words of Linda Greenhouse, the Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter, to the level of "profound constitutional debate," rejected Bork's nomination by a vote of 58-42 because his constitutional views were so extreme.
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One of Roosevelt's youngest fellows, the legal scholar K. Sabeel Rahman, likes to point out that Department of Justice regulators, drawn from conservative legal and economic circles and influenced by the ideas of Robert Bork, essentially rewrote the federal guidelines for mergers and acquisitions and thereby weakened the government's power to make antitrust cases.
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But the most important aspect of Judge Leon's opinion is that it essentially embraces the Bork approach, which rested on a few premises: that markets are inherently competitive; that a firm's dominance in one market cannot be leveraged into another; and that market success is a result of maximizing consumer welfare, not anti-competitive behavior.
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Given the current composition of the Senate, it is hard to imagine a confirmation process that might prevent the appointment of a justice who would vote for Roe's overruling — in the way that Senate objections in 1987 blocked the confirmation of Judge Robert Bork, which ultimately led to Justice Kennedy's promotion to the bench.
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Both parties have been engaged in a tit-for-tat escalation of partisan warfare over judgeships for a generation, from the Senate's defeat of President Ronald Reagan's nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987 through its refusal to take up President Barack Obama's nomination of Judge Merrick B. Garland last year.
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Of course the president and his allies know that's exactly the public conversation that the Republicans fear, because it was clear from the first moment that any Obama nominee would inhabit the constitutional mainstream much more securely than either Judge Bork or Justice Scalia — whose "originalist" philosophy never gained more than a toehold at the court — ever did.
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Joe BidenJoe BidenPossible GOP challenger says Trump doesn't doesn't deserve reelection, but would vote for him over Democrat Joe Biden faces an uncertain path The Memo: Trump pushes back amid signs of economic slowdown MORE (D-Del.) and Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), the Democratic majority successfully rejected President Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.
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They look back at the failed confirmation of the Republican nominee Robert Bork in 1987, whose writings on civil rights were picked over by Democrats, and the 1991 hearings for Clarence Thomas, who faced testimony from Anita Hill that he had sexually harassed her, and they see a sophisticated and ruthless Democratic machine bent on discrediting their nominees.
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As a senator, he fought anti-choice Supreme Court justices, including leading the fight as chairman of the Judiciary Committee to successfully block the nomination of Judge Robert Bork — one of only two potential justices to be rejected by the Senate in the last 218 years — because of concerns regarding Bork's position on choice and access to birth control.
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With the stakes as high as they are, any maneuver can be justified when it comes to Supreme Court politics, and escalation seems inevitable—Democrats and Republicans can both point to the other side, going all the way back to the 80s and Robert Bork, and say those guys were responsible for everything going to hell.
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And if this is the play that they are going to run, I agree, they&aposre going to have a hard time, because this list of nominees, this list of potential nominees that the administration has put forward have excellent credentials, and if they&aposre going to really try to run the Bork play again, it&aposs going to fail.
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Most people don't realize that during Watergate, in the midst of the Saturday Night Massacre, Robert Bork—as solicitor general, the No. 3 official, who became acting attorney general after the resignation of attorney general Elliot Richardson and deputy attorney general William Ruckelshaus—was actually pressured by Richardson and Ruckelshaus to do Nixon's bidding and fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox.
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But I've now read a lot of articles on Ted Kennedy's legacy, and the thing that I find interesting is that the thing I remembered Ted Kennedy for as a senator is something that I have not actually seen people bring up a lot: that he was such a dogged fighter for the Supreme Court justices, especially in the hearings about [Robert] Bork.
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Since World War II, there have been only seven instances of appointments being withdrawn by the president or rejected by the Senate: Homer Thornberry in 1968; Justice Abe Fortas's elevation to chief justice, also in 1968; Clement F. Haynsworth in 1969; G. Harrold Carswell in 1970; Bork and Douglas H. Ginsburg, both in 1987; and Harriet E. Miers in 2005.
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Based on his opinions and dissents over his 12 years on the bench, as well as other writings and activities over the years, Judge Kavanaugh's view of the Constitution and the law is so far outside the mainstream of American legal thinking and of society at large that he makes Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork look like centrists by comparison.
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" During his confirmation hearing to be solicitor general, Bork had also seemingly argued in favor of a Virginia poll tax that had been struck down by the Court in 1966, saying, "It was a very small tax, it was not discriminatory, and I doubt that it had much impact on the welfare of the nation one way or the other.
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Rather, it was the result of the Supreme Court's increased importance in American life, and a wild miscalculation by Republicans and Bork himself of how his viewpoints on laws and statutes that, for instance, desegregated American schools and public institutions — and his work on behalf of the only president to resign from office — would be perceived by the American public.
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Thanks in large part to groundbreaking books in the 1970s by the Supreme Court nominee and Yale Law School antitrust scholar Robert Bork ("The Antitrust Paradox") and Richard Posner (now an influential judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals) at the University of Chicago Law School ("Antitrust Law"), vertical mergers came to be viewed as usually promoting competition and, by extension, consumer welfare.
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" Harris and Hirono each asked Kavanaugh about his work as a private lawyer in the late 1990s, with leading conservatives Roger Clegg and Robert Bork, opposing a Hawaii statute that limited voting for the state's Office of Hawaiian Affairs to native Hawaiians; Harris particularly challenged him over a 1999 Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he twice described the law as a "racial-spoils system.
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Consequently, the Senate can consent, or withhold its "consent," and has done so on numerous occasions, as Joe BidenJoe BidenPossible GOP challenger says Trump doesn't doesn't deserve reelection, but would vote for him over Democrat Joe Biden faces an uncertain path The Memo: Trump pushes back amid signs of economic slowdown MORE and the Senate Democrats did against the nomination of Robert Bork in 1987.
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Many Democratic senators have mined their questions from Kavanaugh's written record of hundreds of thousands of documents as well as published court opinions and law journal articles authored by the 53-year-old Yale Law School graduate, former special prosecutor, presidential advisor and federal appellate judge; its voluminous nature bears comparison to that of Judge Robert Bork, whose confirmation bid was famously sunk 30 years ago.
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And the success seemed to go deeper, not only identifying but ratifying certain principles as being correct and beyond debate: that contrary to Judge Bork's view, the Constitution encompasses a right to privacy that includes abortion; that the First Amendment protects much more than the political speech that Judge Bork claimed as its only legitimate focus; that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is valid in all particulars.
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The insight was that paid media would drive unpaid media: "A news conference to announce the 'premiere' of an anti-Bork commercial starring Gregory Peck, for example, is certain to attract more press coverage, especially TV, than the release of a scholarly report on Bork's record (though the quality of the coverage may be inferior.)" So does this summer's pro-Kavanaugh campaign simply even things up with the past generation's mother of all confirmation battles?
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That's thanks to the perversion of the Supreme Court confirmation process, which once provided the Senate and the public with useful information about a potential justice's views on the Constitution, but which has, ever since the bitter battle over President Ronald Reagan's failed nomination of Robert Bork in 1987, devolved into a second-rate Samuel Beckett play starring an earnest legal scholar who sits for days at a microphone and labors to sound thoughtful while saying almost nothing.
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Failed Supreme Court nominees, 1968-2005 Nominee Nominated by Year Fate Reason Abe Fortas (for chief justice) Lyndon Johnson 1968 Withdrawn Ethics (financial dealings) Clement Haynsworth Richard Nixon 1970 Rejected 23-55 Ethics (financial conflicts of interest) G. Harrold Carswell** Richard Nixon 1970 Rejected 47-52 Competence Robert Bork Ronald Reagan 1987 Rejected 42-58 Ideology Douglas Ginsburg Ronald Reagan 1987 Withdrawn Ethics (marijuana) Harriet Miers George W. Bush 2005 Withdrawn Competence See also Neubauer and Meinhold (2007, 484).
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Some of my most memorable conversations took place over what would become effectively known as the Salon Novak: dinner parties that Karen and I would orchestrate where we witnessed Clare Boothe Luce contending with Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett on the meaning of virtue; Irving Kristol, the godfather of neo-conservatism, and his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb, the historian and Victorian scholar, recount their own intellectual journeys from socialism; and became acquainted with Charles Krauthammer, Bob and Mary Ellen Bork, and Charles Murray.
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Alan B. Morrison, co-founder of the Public Citizen Litigation Group (which had sued Bork over his decision to fire Cox), submitted testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying in part: ...the most disturbing thing about Judge Bork's firing of Archibald Cox is what it shows about his views of executive power and his willingness to disregard a solemn compact made between the President of the United States and his Attorney General nominee, on one side, and the Senate of the United States on the other.
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It is worth noting that in 22019, in the aftermath of the bitter fight in which the Senate rejected the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, Kennedy was confirmed by a vote of 97-0, in part because President Reagan, seeking a conservative nominee who could win broad support, consulted with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe BidenJoe BidenHarry Reid: 'Decriminalizing border crossings is not something that should be at the top of the list' Warren offers plan to repeal 1994 crime law authored by Biden Panel: Jill Biden's campaign message MORE.
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