WHEN CONSERVATIVES LEARNED NOT TO BRING IDEAS TO A KNIFE FIGHT:

The Ugliness Started With Bork (JOE NOCERA, 10/21/11, NY Times)

The Bork fight, in some ways, was the beginning of the end of civil discourse in politics. For years afterward, conservatives seethed at the "systematic demonization" of Bork, recalls Clint Bolick, a longtime conservative legal activist. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution coined the angry verb "to bork," which meant to destroy a nominee by whatever means necessary. When Republicans borked the Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright less than two years later, there wasn't a trace of remorse, not after what the Democrats had done to Bork. The anger between Democrats and Republicans, the unwillingness to work together, the profound mistrust -- the line from Bork to today's ugly politics is a straight one.

It is, to be sure, completely understandable that the Democrats wanted to keep Bork off the court. Lewis Powell, the great moderate, was stepping down, which would be leaving the court evenly divided between conservatives and liberals. There was tremendous fear that if Bork were confirmed, he would swing the court to the conservatives and important liberal victories would be overturned -- starting with Roe v. Wade.

But liberals couldn't just come out and say that. "If this were carried out as an internal Senate debate," Ann Lewis, the Democratic activist, would later acknowledge, "we would have deep and thoughtful discussions about the Constitution, and then we would lose." So, instead, the Democrats sought to portray Bork as "a right-wing loony," to use a phrase in a memo written by the Advocacy Institute, a liberal lobby group.

The character assassination began the day Bork was nominated, when Ted Kennedy gave a fiery speech describing "Robert Bork's America" as a place "in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters," and so on. It continued until the day the nomination was voted down; one ad, for instance, claimed, absurdly, that Bork wanted to give "women workers the choice between sterilization and their job."

Conservatives were stunned by the relentlessness -- and the essential unfairness -- of the attacks. But the truth is that many of the liberals fighting the nomination also knew they were unfair. That same Advocacy Institute memo noted that, "Like it or not, Bork falls (perhaps barely) at the borderline of respectability." It didn't matter. He had to be portrayed "as an extreme ideological activist." The ends were used to justify some truly despicable means. 

Posted by oj at October 22, 2011 8:17 AM
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