Op-Ed: Bork's Failed Supreme Court Nomination Spurred 'End of Civil Discourse in Politics'
Robert Bork’s failed nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court 24 years ago spurred a sea change in politics, according to a columnist.
Writing in the New York Times, op-ed columnist Joe Nocera says the rejection of the opinionated legal intellectual marked a turning point. “The Bork fight, in some ways, was the beginning of the end of civil discourse in politics,” he writes.
According to Nocera, liberals who feared Bork would turn the court in a conservative direction turned to character assassination, seeking to portray Bork as “a right-wing loony” who would turn back the clock on civil rights.
Conservatives seethed over the rejection, he writes. The anger between Democrats and Republicans festered. “The line from Bork to today’s ugly politics is a straight one,” Nocera says.
Bork, 84, has a new role as co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s “justice advisory committee,” Newsweek magazine’s Daily Beast reports. Bork told the publication his initial attraction to Romney is that “he’s not Obama.” Bork also gave his opinions on a variety of legal issues. He said Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan are going to be “activist judges” and the U.S. Supreme Court “has been a runaway court” since the 1930s. He still thinks Griswold v. Connecticut finding a right to marital privacy was wrongly decided and that the First Amendment does not protect pornography.
How does he react to the fact that the verb “to Bork” was coined after his rejection? “Well,” Bork told the Daily Beast, “that’s one form of immortality.”
Corrected at 8:44 a.m. to say that Bork explained his initial attraction to Romney.
