Word: bork
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...across to a national audience as a Mondale-style panderer to special interests. "If Gephardt really wanted to look gutsy," says one party critic, "he'd tell the unions where to go." Biden has tried to look tough by taking command of the battle against Supreme Court Nominee Robert Bork. But he ends up seeming to cater to liberal groups and surrendering his independent judgment on the biggest issue he faces as Senate Judiciary chairman. Babbitt is more consistent in his willingness to take unpopular stands, as he did last week by proposing a national sales...
Supreme Court Justice nominee Robert H. Bork best exemplified the intellectual states rights defense when he used it in the early 1960s to criticize civil rights legislation. He wrote in The New Republic that local communities as represented by their legislatures have the right to decide for themselves what is best. The federal government has no right to mandate for communities what their social norms should or should...
...that should be left to the states. The point was not of jurisdiction, but of the decision itself. Once the Southern states rights defense was laid bare as a defense of racism, it collapsed. Those people who refused to view the issue as a matter of race, such as Bork, insisted that it was merely a cold legal question of jurisidiction. They say they did not realize how things would turn out, that in retrospect they would have spoken differently...
...cannot know. But as the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin has noted, where once Bork opposed civil rights legislation in the name of protecting the autonomy of state legislatures, he now opposes state gay rights legislation. Dworkin asks the appropriate question: does Bork's position in the latter cast doubt on his reasoning in the former. Could it be that Bork's guiding arrow is not a belief in the right of states to decide things for themselves, but rather his adherence to conservative prejudices...
...Senators and the public should be aware that Bork's refusal to recognize a constitutional right to privacy extends to contraception as well as abortion. Bork has referred to the 1965 Supreme Court decision in which the court said married couples have a right to use contraceptives in their homes as "shallow, murky and rhetorical." He called the constitutional right to privacy "simply one more slogan that some Justices will use or not as convenient in the process of writing their own tastes into law." We must not allow this antiwoman, anti-civil rights nominee to be named...