When such arch-conservatives as Antonin Scalia and William Rehnquist (for Chief Justice) were up for confirmation in the senate, the vote to confirm was practically unanimous.
Then, when Reagan nominated Robert Bork for the Supreme Court, somehow he wasn’t acceptable. And, I should mention, I can’t see it having been a stab against Reagan, since the prior two were Reagan’s nominations as well.
What happened? I mean, if Scalia and Rehnquist - the devils themselves, in liberals’ eyes - weren’t too conservative to fight against their confirmation, how much worse could Bork have been?
Well as for Rehnquist, he was already on the Court, and the Chief Justice has only additional administrative power, not judicial, so there really wasn’t much point in contesting his nomination to Chief Justice.
Concerning Scalia, his record prior to nomination, while deeply conservative, didn’t have the elements of, for lack of a better word, looniness, that Bork’s had.
I can’t cite this, but I’m pretty certain I read somewhere that Reagan had made a campaign pledge to nominate the 1st female to the bench in the court’s history (hence, S D O’Connor). Had he followed the advice of his advisors, Messe, et al and nominated O’Connor to fill the 2nd open seat as opposed to the 1st, odds are pretty good that Bork would be seated there today (due to that whole DC honeymoon thing).
I guess in hindsight, affirmative action worked in protecting the masses against those wascally constwuctionists. We can all breathe alot easier in the knowledge 9 lawyers make the legislative decisions for all of us.
We have been through the Bork thing before, thought I can’t remember when. The basic problem with Judge/Professor Bork was (is) that his scholarly writing showed a highly unconventional view of the 14th Amendment. Fundamentally, he thought that the Great Amendment had not changed the Federal-State relationship and, as an editorial comment, that the Civil War never happened.
As a then member of the ACLU, I wrote to ask them why they were opposing Bork, when they hadn’t opposed Scalia. They answered that Bork was worse, but gave no details. BTW that action represented a change in policy. Previously the ACLU had not taken a position on judicial nominees.
Here’s where I see the differences.[ul][]What Sua said. Bork seemed to have a kind of looniness.[]Bork had fired the Watergate prosecutor. Fairly or not, this made him unpopular, []Bork looked beatable. [] Scalia is very smart and a terrific legal scholar – more clear-thinking than Bork. [/ul] Speaking as a conservative, I think Scalia is a terrific Justice. I thing Rehnquist is a fine Chief Justice. I’m just as happy that Bork isn’t on the SC.
I think december’s 2nd point had a lot to do with it- you heard the name Bork, you thought “wasn’t he the hatchet man for the Saturday Night Massacre”?
I disagree with all the preceding posts. It has been widely accepted as a given, ever since the Bork nomination, that any strongly conservative candidate would face the same sort of opposition that Bork did. Ergo it follows that the reason was not unique to Bork, but had to do with his conservative philosophy.
What about Scalia? It would follow that he too would face the same sort of opposition were he nominated today. But he was nominated first, and the process was not as politicized then. The Bork nomination broke new ground, which has since been trodden over and over.
The only question then was why did Scalia not provoke the same sort of opposition back when he was nominated. One possibility is happenstance - it just happened to get started later. Also possible is that liberals saw the court slipping away as Reagan continued to nominate new justices, and decided to take a stand.
I would also check up the balance of the Senate at the time Scalia was nominated - if the Republicans controlled it at the tiime (as the did from 1980-1986) then the entire uestion is moot.
The simple answer is, the Democrats shot down Bork because they could. They had a solid majority in the Senate when Bork was nominated. They’d left Scalia alone for 3 reasons:
They were in the minority and knew they couldn’t beat him.
They had already made a conscious decision to concentrate their impotent, token opposition on William Rehnquist.
Scalia was confirmed unanimously, but the overwhelming majority of Democrats voted AGAINST Rehnquist as Chief Justice.
Since Scalia was replacing Warren Burger, a generally conservative Republican, he wasn’t really changing the balance of power on the Court very much.
A conservative colleague of Bork’s from U Chicago testified against him, because he was concerned about Bork’s contempt for precedent.
Bork did not see any right to privacy in the Constitution. Later decisions by the Supreme Court indicate that he may have been alone in this regard.
His hemming and hawing on Brown v. Board of Ed concerned a lot of people.
Most importantly, IMHO, he couldn’t pull conservatives such as Hugh Heflin over to his side. Southern conservatives feared that he would reargue certain civil rights principles that they preferred would remain settled.
Actually, I thought of the Swedish Chef. You’d never catch Scalia or Rehnquist inspiring a newsgroup with a name like alt.supreme-court.nominee.bork.bork.bork .
My favorite Bork quote was his one about the Ninth Amendment being an “ink blot.”
Scalia may be a brilliant man, but he’s also used his talents to create some amazingly daft legal contradictions, usually in the interests of serving this or that political interest instead of the cause of broader and more coherent law: even for the strict constructionist stance.
