The End of the Bork Era

Nineteen years ago, Senator Edward Kennedy rushed onto the floor of the United States Senate and opened the Bork era. He said:

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would have to sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police would break down citizen’s doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

That was then. Nineteen years later, Senator Kennedy is just another ageing Democratic senator with a taste for bullying witnesses.

This is now. Despite the nastiness of Senator Kennedy’s questioning of Judge Alito, who cares? Who cares what white-haired liberal senators think and do? Their time is past. They are voices of the past, mumbling the ideas of the past. Liberal ideas have consequences, and liberals would rather not talk about it. Because

Ted Kennedy’s America is a land in which mourning women cannot forget how old their aborted baby would be if it were alive today, blacks have been taught to hate the nation that confessed and honestly atoned for its Original Sin, rogue gang-bangers make life a misery for poor people, schoolchildren are not taught much of anything, writers and artists are censored at the whim of the politically correct, and the doors of the federal courts are slammed shut on the fingers of ordinary people to avoid disturbing the latest elite séance channeling a new constitutional penumbra or emanation.

But with Ted Kennedy now a rutted bully rather than the rutting bull of his prime, we can see the Bork era coming to a close. Conservatives have learned how to beat the bork. You nominate a brilliant, mild-mannered appeals court judge who can talk for days and days about the law and about the nice legal issues in this case or that case, and with every word demonstrate that he knows more about the law and about judging than any senator past, present, or future.

And, of course, after being roundly borked, insulted, demeaned, and humiliated for a month or two, the new justice has been thoroughly vaccinated against the disease of Strange New Respect, that malady discovered by political epidemiologist Tom Bethell that often turns good conservative justices into blithering liberals, just so that they can say to the Washington social elite: “You like me! You really like me!”