(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Musings for Friday - The Long Shadow of Nixon and Bork. A Snippet. [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-01-12 Richard Nixon was corrupt. That is a generally accepted truth. Those who dispute that truth can be found also supporting TFG. It would follow that if a man is corrupt and you carry out a corrupt action by a corrupt person, you too are corrupt. And that is what gives us Robert Bork. A quick snippet from Wiki: Fourteen years later Bork’s decision to carry out Nixon’s corrupt order came back to haunt Robert Bork when he was nominated to SCOTUS by Ronald Reagan. We ended up with Anthony Kennedy instead. More from Wiki: Within 45 minutes of Bork's nomination to the Court, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) took to the Senate floor with a strong condemnation of Bork in a nationally televised speech, declaring: 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, and schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would 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. Kennedy’s blocking of Bork had a profound impact on the first term Kentucky Senator named Mitch McConnell who had worked with Bork during the Ford Administration. Numerous documentaries and articles abound in explaining how McConnell has used the failure of the Bork nomination to drive his desire to capture SCOTUS for the GOP/Conservatives. Supreme Revenge: Battle for the Court Supreme Revenge begins by tracing how Bork’s failed nomination in 1987 sparked a desire for revenge from McConnell that would ultimately help shape the Court for decades to come. Alarmed by Bork’s record on civil rights and social issues, liberal Democrats launched protests, phone banks, and attack ads in an effort to prevent his confirmation. But to McConnell, then a first-term senator, and other Republicans, it was an unfair attack based on Bork’s conservative ideology. McConnell’s fabricated history to justify a 2020 Supreme Court Vote Senate Republicans’ decision to vote on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s successorreflects individual and collective cost-benefit calculations of seating a rock-ribbedconservative in what may be the Trump administration’s waning days. As a fig leaf toobscure the hypocrisy of voting on President Trump’s election-year nominee afterrefusing to vote on President Obama’s in early 2016, Republicans have claimed anhistorical norm that doesn’t exist. McConnell’s deep resentment over Bork not becoming a Supreme Court Justice laid the groundwork for where we are today. Every decision he has made has to be taken in light of how McConnell views holding Presidents and SCOTUS nominees accountable for their actions and words. Corrupt men do corrupt actions, and other corrupt men will not hold them accountable. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/1/12/2216983/-Musings-for-Friday-The-Long-Shadow-of-Nixon-and-Bork-A-Snippet?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/