Is Justice Roberts an ‘Obama Judge’?
By Daniel John Sobieski
AmericanThinker.com
November 24, 2018
If the Kavanaugh hearings showed Chief Justice Roberts anything, it should have been that the notion that the Supreme Court is in a pristine bubble immune from political considerations and thoughts is false and has been at least since the days that the character assassins of Robert Bork made his name a verb in the dictionary his failed nomination left on the ash heap of history:
The year was 1987. It was fall. It was November 11. It had been a tough year for President Ronald Reagan. Liberals were going bonkers with Iran-Contra as a hopeful tool to destroy a great president on the verge of winning the Cold War. The media was dubbing Iran-Contra the worst mistake of Reagan’s presidency. It was not. What happened on November 11, 1987 would, in due course, constitute the worst mistake of the Reagan presidency: the nomination of Anthony Kennedy for the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Kennedy pick was supposed to calm the waters after the storm generated by the Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg nominations. Bork would have been a brilliant justice, but leftists savaged the man, transmogrifying him into an ugly beast — a gargoyle. Bork suffered the ignominy of the likes of Senator Ted Kennedy portraying him as “anti-woman.” A new verb was introduced into the political lexicon: the process of being “Borked.”
It had dawned on the Democrats that they could bypass the cumbersome legislative process still tied to that inconvenient “consent of the government thing” by concentrating on the courts and populating it with judges who believed in the “living constitution” which was to be interpreted in the context of the times inflamed by public passions and the liberal cause du jour. Original intent was an anachronism.
Bork’s nomination scared the hell out of Democrats who thought the unalienable right to life Thomas Jefferson placed in the Declaration of Independence didn’t really mean that:
When President Reagan nominated Bork to the Supreme Court, there was no serious question about his qualification for the bench. Just five years earlier, he had been unanimously confirmed for the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, having earned an “exceptionally well qualified” label from the American Bar Association. But in the interim, the Democratic Party had taken control of the Senate. The late Senator Ted Kennedy orchestrated a smear campaign against Bork so breathtaking in its distortion that even the liberal Washington Post denounced it as a “lynching.” On Oct. 3, 1987, Bork’s nomination was rejected by the Senate on a 58-42 vote.
Bork was an originalist, meaning that he believed the Constitution contained no “penumbras” and “emanations” one could hang an imaginary right to an abortion on, a fact which prompted Chappaquiddick’s champion of women’s rights, Sen. Ted Kennedy, to cross that bridge when he came to it in his epic rant on Bork’s nomination:
The Rest…HERE
