Word: bork
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...liberals' last redoubts on Capitol Hill, the only place where Democrats, locked out of the White House for the past 10 years, can attempt to fend off conservative nominees to the court. Even when Biden and Massachusetts' Edward Kennedy teamed up four years ago to defeat Robert Bork, it looked as if the Democrats could only briefly prevent the Reagan White House from seizing control of the Supreme Court well into the 21st century. That proved a Pyrrhic victory...
...After Bork, the White House devised a sort of Ferdinand the Bull strategy for future nominees: it taught them to win by refusing to engage. "There isn't much that the Senate can do about rejecting a nominee or thwarting the President. All a nominee has to say is, 'I have an open mind,' " says Yale Kamisar of the University of Michigan Law School. With that strategy, the White House easily slipped through the innocuous but no less conservative Anthony Kennedy and the enigmatic David Souter. Says Kamisar: "The lesson is that the Bork hearings were an aberration...
...When Lyndon Johnson picked Justice Abe Fortas to be Chief Justice in 1968, conservatives like South Carolina's Strom Thurmond demanded that he explain his judicial philosophy; after 10 days on the hot seat, Fortas was ultimately rejected. But during the Bork hearings, Thurmond argued that his colleagues should consider only the judge's competence, temperament and integrity...
...Kennedy made the same argument in 1967 when he defended the Supreme Court appointment of Thurgood Marshall, the retiring Justice whom Thomas would replace. But as a committee member 20 years later, the Massachusetts Senator led what was almost exclusively an ideological campaign against Bork...
...Biden went after Thomas for the latter's "natural law" approach to interpreting the Constitution, by which judges can invoke vague notions of eternal justice that pre-exist the written document. Yet in his opening remarks to Bork four years ago, Biden celebrated something that sounded like a liberal's version of "natural law" as the common man's reproach to Bork's literal reading of the Constitution. "As a child of God," said Biden, "I believe my rights are not derived from the Constitution . . . My rights are because I exist...