Then hopefully, enough people remember and they will fire him when he is up for re-election. He sure doesn’t sound like he is stable enough to be Sheriff.
I give you full credit for the pun, but none for the underlying sentiment. Bork’s treatment was indeed unjustified.
But that’s simply my opinion, and it’s ALSO my opinion that the GOP is going to get essentially all its transition nominees confirmed. That latter will transform itself into fact in a little while.
Darn tootin’. The nerve of those Dems - and Republicans - holding Bork responsible for his own words! Why, such a thing had never been done before in American politics! What a savage ‘Borking’ indeed - no wonder it became a verb! And no wonder radicals like Sen. John Warner (R-VA) voted against him, they were probably under orders from Moscow!
What is the precise objective determinant of “essentially”?
Then so was the treatment given to every rejected nominee. Hardly an acid test. Whether that’s better or worse that how Garland was treated is also a matter of opinion, but there are notable differences such that each man is more analogous to other historical nominees then they are to each other.
Bork wasn’t a party in Nader v. Bork?
His first claim was the plaintiffs lacked standing and the controversy was moot - while the President was being impeached, partly for that incident.
“Defendant suggests that, even if Mr. Cox’s discharge had been unlawful on October 20, the subsequent abolition of the Office of Watergate Special Prosecutor was legal and effectively discharged Mr. Cox at that time.”
By the regulation that created the Special Prosecutor, “The Special Prosecutor will carry out these responsibilities with the full support of the Department of Justice, until such time as, in his judgment, he has completed them or until a date mutually agreed upon between the Attorney General and himself.”
He was named in the suit. He offered a defense, and got slapped the fuck down. The case was cited in more than a dozen other cases, included another Watergate case. Everything in your post is the opposite of the brief. Are you ignorant of the case or just lying?
#AlternativeFacts
You mean Nader v. Bork, 366 F. Supp. 104 (Dist. Court, DC 1973) ?
No, never heard of it. ::rolleyes::
Because I have dissected this at length in other threads, I summarized this quickly.
Bork is named in the suit as the Acting Attorney General. He was not a personal defendant and did not have the authority to direct the arguments used on his putative behalf.
So the dismissal was not illegal? Or the illegality is unreliable? Can we not hold Bork responsible for his actions, because he only did it as Acting Attorney General, and was thus ordered by the President? Is legal culpability avoided by just following orders?
If you have the time, please do link on of your dissections. I have no problem reading more on the subject.
Hypothetically, what could Bork’s defense have entailed? “I honestly believed at the time that the dismissal of Cox was within the president’s purview,” perhaps? Maybe he’d’ve just gotten wrist-slapped for it.
I’m saying that even though the court ruled that the dismissal of Cox by Bork was illegal, that ruling is not strong evidence that the action was actually illegal: it was a non-precedent district court ruling that the government did not appeal, and in fact did not even really fight at trial.
So “the illegality is unreliable” is a pretty good summary, I guess.
The legality has nothing to do with just following orders. The Special Prosecutor was a creature of the President’s, and the President had the authority to fire him.
From a moral perspective, Bork was willing to resign rather than carry out the order, but both Elliot Richardson and Bill Ruckelshaus urged him not to. They believed that since both of their own resignations had failed to sway Nixon, Nixon was prepared to keep firing people until he found a mail room supervisor down the line who would sign the termination letter. So Ruckelshaus urged Bork to not resign, lest the Department lose the most senior leadership it had left.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=19923952&postcount=94
And as a result of this discussion, a good (if simplified) analogy from DSYoungEsq:
This is a pretty ridiculous digression from the digression. Sure, the fact that Bork was the one to fire Archie Cox back in 1973 didn’t exactly help him win any popularity contests in the late 1980s, but his stances on the Ninth Amendment and the right to privacy, his stated desire to roll back the civil rights protections granted by the Warren court of the 1960s, and his opposition to the notion that the Federal government had the right to impose standards of voting fairness on the states - all these played a much bigger role in his defeat than the Saturday Night Massacree, with or without the four-part harmony.
Bork was ‘borked’ by being who he was, and having taken the stances he did on important issues that the Court was likely to revisit. Unfair!
We also created them.
No question about it! But most of us didn’t realize the extent to which those Third World strongmen were our tax dollars at work, so we just ridiculed them.
I just wanted to stop back and point out that this thread is now the 4th google result for the search “was the nader v bork ruling unreliable”, behind the brief on justia.com, a NYT opinion piece, and an American Bar document, and ahead of Bork’s Wikipedia entry. We’re writing history, folks!
I’ll take the hijack out of the thread now, just felt the need to point out my discovery.
That’s not an analogy; It’s a straight description of what happened with a bunch of damning facts left out. He wasn"t just some employee who got ordered to do something dubious, he was an experienced lawyer. And he knew he was being asked to perform this task becuse two other experienced lawyers resigned rather than perform this task. And legality aside, it’s of suspicious morality even to a layman.
I have no confidence in the voters to go a different direction and vote him out; too many are hopelessly reactionary and/or malleable. It would take an atypically formidable opponent to have a chance. Clarke had 4x as many votes as his challenger in the 2014 general election.
It was an analogy. The analogy highlights the aspect that was evidently unclear: that the trial was not a true adversarial contest, and so the claim that “a court ruled” the firing illegal is not as persuasive as it might otherwise sound.
I bet Bork was a Cowboys fan.
Now you’re just being deliberately hurtful.