The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Justice Amy Coney Barrett

Posted on | October 26, 2020 | 2 Comments

Tonight the Senate voted, 52-48, to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. The rhetoric from Democrats was so over-the-top that viewers of CNN or MSNBC might be forgiven if they believed that, upon her confirmation, Justice Barrett immediately obtained the power to cancel everybody’s health insurance and much else besides. The question needs to be asked, “Why?” Not just why Democrats have succumbed to hysteria, but why the process of confirming Supreme Court justices has become so entangled in political drama. We could start this explanation at several points in the past (e.g., when the Supreme Court in the 1930s struck down many of FDR’s New Deal measures as unconstitutional), but the obvious and logical beginning of this history is Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork in 1987. Senate Democrats, led by Ted Kennedy, then engaged in what has ever since been known as “borking.”

Why did Bork get “borked”? Democrats had lost two consecutive presidential elections by landslide margins (Reagan’s victory in 1984 was one of the largest landslides in U.S. history), but they had never lost control of the House of Representatives and, while the GOP had won a Senate majority in 1980, they lost that majority in the 1986 midterm, when Democrats scored a net gain of eight seats to win a 55-45 majority. Meanwhile, Reagan was still fighting the fallout of the “Iran-Contra” scandal, and Senate Democrats in 1987 were not only eager to exercise their newly gained majority power, but were looking ahead to the 1988 presidential election campaign. Three Democratic senators — Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois, Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee and Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware — were soon to declare their White House candidacies, and it was in this highly charged political climate that “borking” began.

Ted Kennedy notoriously denounced Bork’s nomination:

“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.”

Every word of that was a lie, of course. Ted Kennedy was one of the most wicked and dishonest men ever to darken the doors of the Senate. But what the Democrats did to Bork in 1987 was just a warm-up for their dreadful smearing of Clarence Thomas in 1990. Joe Biden presided over that heinous affair as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and if you ever needed a reason to vote against Joe Biden, that was enough.

Guess who did the swearing-in of Justice Comey?

Someone should ask Joe Biden how he likes this “dish best served cold.”




 

Category: Supreme Court

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2 Responses to “Justice Amy Coney Barrett”

  1. Barrett is the golden calf – Adam Piggott
    October 27th, 2020 @ 3:35 pm

    […] Amy Barrett was confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice today. […]

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