“I loved what happened in the Bork hearings. … The Bork hearings were great. The Bork hearings were educational.”

–Elena Kagan on Breitbart TV.

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, but the Senate rejected his nomination following an intensely partisan debate led by Senators Ted (now dead) Kennedy and Joe (teats on a boar) Biden.

The Bork confirmation hearings were arguably the most contentious in the two-hundred-year history of the U.S. Constitution. The hearings were nothing more than a witch hunt to slander and smear a great legal mind to gain ideological control over the Court and the Constitution.

The majority of the senators who questioned Bork were focused on his vilification, not his jurisprudence. In particular, Kennedy used slanderous accusations and outright lies to demonize him.

“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… President Reagan … should not be able to … impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice.”

–Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) quoted on Power Line.

The Economist agreed with Bork that

“There was not a line in Ted Kennedy’s speech that was accurate.”

Kennedy’s excoriating witch hunt worked so well to discredit the judge, whose legal competence and personal integrity were beyond doubt, that the word “borked” was invented as a verb to describe a Supreme Court or federal judgeship nominee who was denied confirmation as a result of sustained public disparagement.

Bork was rejected because he viewed the Constitution as the “the Founders’ Constitution” bound by original intent and not as a “living” instrument subjected to the interpretive whims of a leftist judiciary.

“You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.”

–Charles Austin Beard from Wikiquote.

Bork argued that the court’s task is to adjudicate and not to “legislate from the bench”; i.e., judges should restrain from ad hoc pronouncements or subjective value judgments in deciding cases.

“We are increasingly governed not by law or elected representatives but by an unelected, unrepresentative, unaccountable committee of lawyers applying no law other than their own will.”

–Judge Robert Bork as quoted in Eagle Forum.

The rule of law and the Constitution would be more secure had Bork joined Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas on the high court, but instead the Senate will likely add another Brother O lackey to join Sotomayor, only this one doesn’t know that we live in a Constitutional Republic not a Constitutional Democracy.

“The Bork hearings were the best thing that ever happened to Constitutional Democracy.”

–Elena Kagan on Breitbart TV.

Not only are the two aforementioned forms of government dissimilar, they are antithetical. From The American Ideal of 1776: The Twelve Basic American Principles:

An Important Distinction: Democracy versus Republic

In a democracy, the power of the majority is unlimited lacking legal safeguards to protect the rights of the individual and the minority; in a republic, the power of the majority is limited by a constitution safeguarding the rights of the individual and the minority.

According to Bork, Kagan’s regard for the Israeli Supreme Court’s quintessential activist judge Aharon Barak as her “judicial hero” disqualifies her to sit on the Supreme Court. Kagan’s acclamation of Barak, whom Bork considers “the worst judge on the planet” and whom federal appeals court judge Richard Posner says “is a law unto himself,” reveals her potential as an activist justice.

“I try to be guided by my North Star, which is justice. I try to make law and justice converge, so that the Justice will do justice.”

–Aharon Barak, Israeli Supreme Court justice, as quoted in National Review.

“Don’t tell me words don’t matter” when it’s their world view they share, and not just rhetoric.

If Senate Republicans cared as much about the Constitution and the political direction of the country as they do about maintaining a cordial relationship with leftist Democrats and the lapdog media, they would to do a time-limited filibuster of Kagan until after the August recess to make her confirmation hearings as educational for Americans as Bork’s were for her.

Has America become the land of the special interest and home of the double standard?

Let’s see: If we lie to the Congress it’s a felony and if the Congress lies to us it’s just politics. If we dislike a black person, we’re racist and if a black person dislikes whites it’s his First Amendment right. The government spends millions to rehabilitate criminals and does almost nothing for the victims. In public schools you can teach that homosexuality is OK but you’d better not use the word “God” in the process. You can kill an unborn child, but it’s wrong to execute a mass murderer.

We don’t burn books in America — we now rewrite them. We got rid of the communist and socialist threat by renaming adherents “progressives.” We are unable to close our border with Mexico, but have no problem protecting the 38th parallel in Korea. If you protest against President Obama’s policies you’re a terrorist, but if you burned an American flag or George Bush in effigy it was your First Amendment right.

You can have pornography on TV or the Internet, but you’d better not put a Nativity scene in a public park during Christmas. We have eliminated all criminals in America — they are now called sick people. We can use a human fetus for medical research, but it’s wrong to use an animal.

We take money from those who work hard for it and give it to those who don’t want to work. We all support the Constitution, but only when it supports our political ideology. We still have freedom of speech, but only if we are being politically correct. Parenting has been replaced with Ritalin and video games. The land of opportunity is now the land of handouts. The similarity between Hurricane Katrina and the gulf oil spill is that neither president did anything to help.

And how do we handle a major crisis today? The government appoints a committee to determine who’s at fault, then threatens them, passes a law, raises our taxes, and tells us the problem is solved so incumbents can get back to their reelection campaigns.

What has happened to the land of the free and the home of the brave?

© Ken Huber, all rights reserved.