If you don't think that there's nothing funnier than the sight of a guy holding a copy of Atlas Shrugged and complaining about how he just can't get a fair shake from the Washington Post, you probably don't have a sense of humor at all. Or you're not very bright. Whichever.
Contemporary Republicans also don't have a particularly solid grasp of history, which is probably why the outrage machine wasn't sent into overdrive with Bork's death. With the exception of ranting about Woodrow Wilson, today's Republicans barely acknowledge anything that happened prior to 1980.
Worse than that, although they hold the memory of Ronald Reagan on the same kind of Olympian pedestal that Barack Obama has himself nominated on, they don't seem to remember very many facts about his presidency. The Reagan that I'm constantly preached to about on Fox News and blogs isn't the Reagan I remember being president. As a matter of fact, it isn't the Reagan presented in the innumerable (and often fawning) memoirs of those that served in his administration.
That the passing of Robert Bork didn't get the kind of coverage I would have expected it to was more than likely due to the fact that nobody really remembers him. Given modern attention spans, 1987 may well be 1587.
I like Richard over at Eye on a Crazy Planet quite a bit. We don't agree on a whole lot, but he's a good writer and seems like good people. And he's the only person I'm aware who started the debate about Bork that I've wanted to have, but have been too lazy to start myself.
The contemporary conservative wisdom about the Bork nomination, which Richard reinforces, was that it was all the Democrats fault. They started fighting dirty to win an ideological battle that didn't previously exist.
Smarter Democrats will now concede that going after Bork on ideological grounds was a mistake. Firstly because Republicans would shortly become better and meaner at it, and expand well beyond Supreme Court nominations. Secondly, the Bork nomination probably could have been defeated without resorting to philosophical guerrilla warfare.
Were they half as bright as they thought they were, Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden could just as easily made Bork's hearings an exploration of his role in the Saturday Night Massacre as they were about nonsense like abortion. Presented properly, especially with Watergate still being the very recent past in 1987, it could have killed Bork's hopes of sitting on the High Court. And it was the Saturday Night Massacre that finally convinced most people that President Nixon could and would be removed from office.
Nixon, through Attorney General Elliott Richardson, appointed the very first Special Counsel, Archibald Cox to investigate the exploding Watergate scandal. As soon as the existence of the president's secret taping system was exposed, Cox demanded the tapes. Citing executive privilege, Nixon not only refused to hand them over, he ordered Cox to stop asking for them, violating his pledge to Richardson to stay out of the investigation. Cox ignored the order and subpoenaed the tapes.
On Saturday October 20, 1973 Nixon ordered Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused and resigned. Nixon then passed the order to Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, who also refused and resigned. The third-ranking officer in the Justice Department was the Solicitor General, Robert Bork, who carried out the order and was made Acting Attorney General for the balance of the year. The Cox firing was subsequently found to be illegal and Nixon named Leon Jaworski special prosecutor. The Saturday Night Massacre was the predicate for Nixon's eventual resignation because it smacked of obstruction of justice, an obstruction that Bork carried out. While it's true that Bork was later confirmed by the Senate to serve on the U.S Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court is a very different matter.
You know who agrees with this line of thinking? Republicans. I know that because they used very similar logic in trying to defeat Eric Holder's nomination to be Attorney General in light of his role in Bill Clinton's midnight pardon of Marc Rich.
As a matter of historical fact, Democrats weren't the first ones to play dirty pool with the Supreme Court. That honor again goes to President Richard Nixon, with an able assist from congressional Republicans.
Nixon and Chief Justice Earl Warren had loathed one another for nearly twenty years when the former was elected president. Wanting to deny Nixon the opportunity the name the next chief to the Court, Warren resigned not long before the 1968 election. Lyndon Johnson then nominated his longtime crony and fixer, Justice Abe Fortas to the position.
Fortas had received speaking fees from American University (which weren't illegal, then or now) which Republicans and Dixiecrats used to filibuster the nomination, the first time that had happened in a Supreme Court nomination. A subsequent, more serious scandal forced Fortas to resign from the Court entirely in 1969
Nixon was determined to have as many friendly seats as he could on the Court (and finally wound up with four.) After Fortas resigned, the president, through then House Minority Leader Gerald Ford, engineered an attempt to impeach Justice William O. Douglas for outside income similar to Fortas'. However, in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Ford also cited as grounds for removal Douglas' opinions in an obscenity case and some outside writings, making the impeachment transparently political. One of Ford's most famous quotes "An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history" comes from the Douglas matter.
With the exception of two singularly unqualified Nixon nominees (Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell,) Democrats hadn't seriously impeded Republican nominees to the Supreme Court. Antonin Scalia, for example, was confirmed by a Senate vote of 98-0 just a year prior to Bork's nomination.
But I'm sure that they remembered how the GOP launched the first filibuster against Fortas and tried to impeach Douglas. When they had a clear shot at a vulnerable Republican nominee in Robert Bork, they took it. In retrospect, I'm only surprised at how patient they were.
As I said earlier, I like Richard and Eye on a Crazy Planet quite a bit. But I would respectfully suggest that the history is considerably more complicated than his post implies. This wasn't started in 1987 and it wasn't started by Democrats. The Official Republican Narrative would have you believe otherwise, but that narrative is frequently untrue.
When Richard says that "With his death, now might be an appropriate time to look back and see if there is a way to start healing a still debilitated process," he seems to imply that self-examination is a process that should be exclusive to Democrats.
Unsurprisingly, I disagree. Republicans and conservatives have spent the last year getting their asses kicked from one end of the country to the other. In large part this is because of a deeply odd alternate reality bubble that they've built around themselves. But as we all learned on November 6, denying reality doesn't make it any less real.
Republicans have spent decades now denying their more unsavory characters and actions. Not only do you have a hard time finding a conservative who will say that President Reagan actually broke the law in trading arms for hostages, it's a challenge to find a Republican who'll admit that Nixon was president at all.
But Nixon wasn't alone. He had the full support of his party in Congress and not a few conservative southern Democrats that would soon become Republicans in his judicial wars. They knew exactly what they were doing, and they had to know that there would be consequences for it someday. They just didn't care. It shouldn't surprise anyone that liberals would one day exact their revenge, as they did on Bork and Clarence Thomas.
Anyone who thinks that this problem is going to rectify itself unless both conservatives and liberals engage in some self-examination is either dishonest or delusional.
The Constitution didn't foresee political parties and avoided a parliamentary system, in part, to preclude them. President Washington repeatedly warned against their establishment without success. The system was able to endure parties that it wasn't designed to accommodate because America historically had long periods of one-party dominance.
In the last twenty years that's become less and less true. Not only are there more "wave elections" at any other time in American history, they're coming closer and closer together. As the balance of power is dramatically upended more frequently, partisan warfare increases exponentially and the system starts to break down.
If you prefer a government that does nothing, that's great. Unfortunately, the U.S government hasn't "done nothing" for a century now. Its foreign and military policies are overextended to the breaking point and the balance sheet is disastrously out of whack. A broken political system, under these circumstances, will eventually destroy the country.
I agree with Richard that the story of Robert Bork should be studied, but there's a context in the decades that bookend the defeat of his nomination that shouldn't be ignored.
History is the study of trends, not incidents. In strict isolation, Franz Ferdinand was just some obscure Austrian that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Within the context of greater trends, his assassination was the opening salvo of the First World War.
Robert Bork is emblematic of a larger trend that began long before his nomination and continues to this day.
0 comments:
Post a Comment