Robert Bork, R.I.P.

from Stand Firm by David Fischler 

A great judicial thinker and advocate for conservative political, social, and cultural ideals has died:

Robert H. Bork, the conservative jurist who fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973 and whose failed nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987 sparked an enduring political schism over judicial nominations, died early Wednesday at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington of complications from heart disease. He was 85.

Judge Bork was the kind of systematic constitutional scholar who scared liberals to death. So, when he was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, Senate Democrats and their allies in the media and legal and political activist communities undertook what amounted to a political campaign to destroy his reputation and nomination. The Washington Post quotes the lowest point of that campaign, a speech on the floor of the Senate by Edward Kennedy that could have come straight out of a bad Allen Drury novel:

“Robert Bork’s 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’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is — and is often the only — protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

The Bork nomination not only gave the English language a new verb (“to Bork,” meaning to conduct a campaign of character assassination in pursuit of political goals, or as it came to be known in the Clinton years, “the politics of personal destruction”). It also kicked off a quarter century process of disintegration in American political discourse, of which the campaign of 2012–with its daily lies, misrepresentations, trivial as well as slanderous personal accusations, and overwhelming Big Media support for one party–is the nadir, at least to date. That’s not to say that politics in America before Bork was Athenian; far from it. But the extent to which the culture of falsehood and character assassination has become embedded in the larger American culture, and made ubiquitous by the professional media and the Internet has taken things way beyond Mr. Dooley’s 19th century admonition that “politics ain’t beanbag.”

That Robert Bork did not deserve his senatorial lynching is now conceded even by many who opposed him at the time. He had the last laugh, however, by becoming what Justice Antonin Scalia called “one of the most influential legal scholars of the past 50 years. His impact on legal thinking in the fields of Antitrust and Constitutional Law was profound and lasting.” He has been vindicated, and he will be missed.