Robert Bork
December 20, 2012
DON VINCENZO writes:
Robert Bork died yesterday. The nation has lost a great patriot, towering jurisprudential intellect, and devoted Christian.
I met him only once, but during our extended conversation (at an airport where we were awaiting boarding of a delayed flight), I came to realize that, to quote the Bard, Judge Bork’s qualities were such that:
Whenever the bright sun of heaven shall shine,
His honor and the greatness of his name, shall be…
Requiescat in pace.
Lawrence Auster writes at VFR:
The battle over Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in Fall 1987 was a landmark event in modern American history. Using a Sony Walkman at a law office where I was then working as a temp (ironically, it was the radical leftist law firm in Greenwich Village headed by Leonard Boudin, father of the Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin), I listened, enthralled, to Bork’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. With his comprehensive understanding of the Constitution and ability to state it so clearly, which set him off from the mental sparrows who usually were nominated to the Supreme Court before and after him (think O’Connor, Kennedy, Souter), I felt I was listening to a mind with the same scope as Hamilton’s or Madison’s.
The lynching of Bork by the Democrats, led by the beyond-egregious Edward Kennedy, has frequently been identified as the beginning of the politics of personal destruction. Listening to Kennedy’s shockingly vile smearing of Bork at the hearings ended the last tiny bit of vestigial affection I had had for him. After that, I regarded him as simply a thug, and never veered from that view.
