Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

When Joe Nocera Became an Op-Ed Columnist, a Remarkably Good Long-Form Reporter Became a Flaneur of Unsurpassed Ignorance:

rootless_e said...

And bork's "scholarship" was deeply dishonest. If you are going to proclaim "originalism", but don't want to consider the intent of the Radical Republicans whose amendments radically changed the Constitution, you are confessing to being a fake.

smintheus said...

Bork had a long and bizarre history by the time he was nominated for the Supreme Court - a fact that Nocera does not acknowledge in any way. Indeed, Nocera goes so far as to deny it, implicitly ("Whatever you think of [his] views, they cannot be fairly characterized as extreme").

It's striking that the name "Nixon" does not get mentioned by Nocera. It may well be true that the "ugliness all started with Bork," if Nocera means that the Nixonians changed the whole nature of national politics for the late 20th century by institutionalizing their militant hyper-partisanship with its scorched-earth tactics.

Enlightened Layperson said...

I've read Bork's The Tempting of America, and Boyle's analysis is correct. Bork accuses his opponents of being moral relativists for believing that one individual's morality is just as good as any other's. He then takes the equally relativist position that one majority's view is just as good as any other's. He does not appear to notice the contradiction.

Tyrone Slothrop said...

Before Carter, federal appellate judges were chosen by the Senators from the state in question. Carter took this power from the Senate and tried to pick judges by merit. Reagan then used this newly centralized power to install conservative judges. This is when we first all learned about the Federalist Society. Reagan's efforts led to the appointment of Bork. To say that the blocking of Bork was the point when ideology upset the nonpartisan comity of American politics is to simply ignore what Reagan was up to. It wasn't a secret. There is a reason why conservatives want to put him on Mt Rushmore.

Altoid said...

Roger that, rootless, unless later amendments are somehow subject to limitations imposed by the original framers, or something . . .

But there's another aspect to the Bork nomination that I really don't think has ever gotten enough play. Bork was the stand-in who was promoted when a far better man resigned rather than follow Nixon's order to fire Archibald Cox, simply because he was willing to fire Cox. In other words, he was a political hack, and the fact that he was willing to carry his hackitude as far as he did was a primary impetus behind the (I believe now-defunct) special prosecutor law.

In the politics of the situation, nominating Bork was an in-your-face to anyone who believed Nixon had gone off the rails. It was kind of comparable to Jackson nominating Taney, because Taney was the hack who was willing to actually remove federal deposits from the second Bank of the US when the treasury secretary resigned. Except that Taney was able later to distinguish himself in the Dred Scott case because Jackson's senate allies had enough votes to award him the prize. What Bork would have done we can only guess at.