Tag: Robert Bork

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine. Brett Kavanaugh's indignant warning to Democrats last week may be the defining ethos of this political era. As I write this, the fate of Kavanaugh's nomination remains undecided, but there is no doubt that the outcome will trigger howls of outrage among tens of millions of people — and vows of vengeance. This is our politics now: No uplifting rhetoric about "hope" or "a shining city on the hill." No poetry. No norms. No decency. It is grievance, revenge, and identity, all the way down. Furious Democrats cite the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton (in which Kavanaugh played a prominent and censorious role), the 2000 Bush v. Gore ruling, and last year's refusal by Senate Republicans to even consider President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. The Kavanaugh nomination now goes on the bonfire.

Some say it started with Robert Bork’s 1987 Supreme Court confirmation battle. Sure, people have strong feelings about Trump’s personality, but they also get worked up because so much is at stake. If federal spending still amounted to 2 to 3 percent of GDP, people likely wouldn’t care as passionately about election outcomes. Similarly, as the size and scope of the federal government increases, interest groups will spend more on elections in an effort to influence the levers of government. In the year 2000, I wrote a study in the Journal of Law and Economics that found that the growth of state governments could explain almost 80 percent of the increase in spending on gubernatorial and legislative races from 1976 to 1994. The Supreme Court — and the federal courts generally — are more deeply involved in our lives than they were 50 years ago. District court cases have grown over the same period from 448 to 1,252 per million Americans. Existing agencies were also granted new regulatory powers. In my 2013 book, Dumbing Down the Courts, I find that the length of Supreme Court confirmation hearings has grown with the expansion of judicial power. I thought that President Obama was continually making false statements about gun control and health care, but I never called him a liar in any of my op-eds or media appearances.

Anthony Kennedy: US supreme court justice to retire Read more This was the Washington drama that unfolded in 1987 – when the president was Ronald Reagan, and his supreme court nominee was the controversial Robert Bork. Anthony Kennedy, who this week announced his retirement as a justice of the supreme court, was a decent man. Although some of his votes on abortion cases were bad, at the most pivotal moment – in a watershed 1992 decision – he voted to uphold the Roe v Wade supreme court decision to safeguard a woman’s right to an abortion. It’s amazing to think that John Roberts, the conservative chief justice, could actually be the moderating force on the supreme court. And then, if they win control of the Senate in the midterms, the Democrats could actually block whoever it is that Trump nominates. We could see a case of Bork redux.Even without Senate control, the Democrats will need only one Republican to join them in order to delay a vote until after those elections. In the wake of Justice Kennedy’s retirement announcement, I spent the afternoon walking back through history and was reassured by listening to another Kennedy. Who now will be the Senate’s Democratic lion to defeat the forces of reaction? After the defeat, Reagan was forced to pick a less ideologically pure candidate for the court. Let’s hope that history does repeat itself and that, in the fight to replace this Kennedy, a passionate and reliable defender of women’s rights emerges to be the Ted Kennedy of our day.