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“Speaking Ill of the Dead”: Robert Bork, An Unrepentant Reactionary Who Had Boundless Contempt For Modern America

What do you say when a public figure you find repellent dies? Do you hold your tongue, not speak ill of the dead, and wait some decent interval before saying what you really thought of them? After all, there’s no time like their death. Robert Bork died today, and the truth is that in a few months nobody is going to be talking much about his legacy. So now’s the time to weigh in, which Jeffrey Toobin does, in a rather unrestrained way:

Robert Bork, who died Wednesday, was an unrepentant reactionary who was on the wrong side of every major legal controversy of the twentieth century. The fifty-eight senators who voted against Bork for confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1987 honored themselves, and the Constitution. In the subsequent quarter-century, Bork devoted himself to proving that his critics were right about him all along.

Hard to disagree—Bork’s philosophy was a particularly nasty one, and he spent much of his public life expressing his boundless contempt for modern America, particularly the ways it had become more humane than it once was. For all I know he was beloved by his family, and I could offer them my sympathies, but that would be meaningless for them; they don’t know me from Adam.

I think it’s possible to talk honestly about someone’s contributions, and your criticisms of them, without getting needlessly uncivil. For instance, the media provocateur Andrew Breitbart died earlier this year at the young age of 43. That was a personal tragedy for his family and friends. But there are few people who injected as much poison into American politics in as short a time as Breitbart did, and when he died that had to be acknowledged. You don’t have to do that in a vulgar way, of course, but like Bork or anyone else who chooses to participate in a visible way, he chose the life he did.

Being criticized, even harshly, is the price you pay for participating in public life. If you can live with it while you’re alive, you shouldn’t have too much of a problem with having it happen when you die. So even though my death won’t be reported on the evening news, I’d like to state for the record that should anyone want to take the occasion of my demise to remind their audience that in their opinion I was a knave and a fool, go ahead and have at it.

 

By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 19, 2012

December 20, 2012 Posted by | Ideologues, Public Figures | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Speaking Ill Of The Dead”: Robert Bork, An Unrepentant Reactionary Who Had Boundless Contempt For Modern America

What do you say when a public figure you find repellent dies? Do you hold your tongue, not speak ill of the dead, and wait some decent interval before saying what you really thought of them? After all, there’s no time like their death. Robert Bork died today, and the truth is that in a few months nobody is going to be talking much about his legacy. So now’s the time to weigh in, which Jeffrey Toobin does, in a rather unrestrained way:

Robert Bork, who died Wednesday, was an unrepentant reactionary who was on the wrong side of every major legal controversy of the twentieth century. The fifty-eight senators who voted against Bork for confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1987 honored themselves, and the Constitution. In the subsequent quarter-century, Bork devoted himself to proving that his critics were right about him all along.

Hard to disagree—Bork’s philosophy was a particularly nasty one, and he spent much of his public life expressing his boundless contempt for modern America, particularly the ways it had become more humane than it once was. For all I know he was beloved by his family, and I could offer them my sympathies, but that would be meaningless for them; they don’t know me from Adam.

I think it’s possible to talk honestly about someone’s contributions, and your criticisms of them, without getting needlessly uncivil. For instance, the media provocateur Andrew Breitbart died earlier this year at the young age of 43. That was a personal tragedy for his family and friends. But there are few people who injected as much poison into American politics in as short a time as Breitbart did, and when he died that had to be acknowledged. You don’t have to do that in a vulgar way, of course, but like Bork or anyone else who chooses to participate in a visible way, he chose the life he did.

Being criticized, even harshly, is the price you pay for participating in public life. If you can live with it while you’re alive, you shouldn’t have too much of a problem with having it happen when you die. So even though my death won’t be reported on the evening news, I’d like to state for the record that should anyone want to take the occasion of my demise to remind their audience that in their opinion I was a knave and a fool, go ahead and have at it.

 

By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 19, 2012

December 12, 2012 Posted by | Judges, Politics | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Romney’s Latest Abortion U-Turn”: A Cynical, Shameless, Blantant And Misleading Incremental Republican Strategy

How embarrassing is it to have a surrogate caught on tape saying exactly the opposite of what you’ve been saying for years? Not very embarrassing, apparently, if you’re Mitt Romney, and especially if the topic is abortion rights. Then, cynical shamelessness is your standard operating procedure.

Yesterday, former Republican Sen. Norm Coleman told a Republican Jewish Coalition gathering in Ohio that when it comes to Roe v. Wade, pay no attention to those men in black robes. “President Bush was president eight years, Roe v. Wade wasn’t reversed. He had two Supreme Court picks, Roe v. Wade wasn’t reversed,” Coleman said. “It’s not going to be reversed.”

That’s blatantly and intentionally misleading, crafted to assuage voters who are presumably socially liberal in what looks to be the most crucial state for the election. It’s also the exact opposite of what Romney has promised he’ll support, publicly and often.

Coleman’s plausible deniability comes from the fact that it looks as though not much changed under the last Republican president. But as I reported last week, these kinds of shifts don’t happen overnight — not only because it takes years for laws to be passed and then to wind their way through the court system, but because many in the anti-choice movement have opted for an incremental strategy to avoid scaring the public, even as they prepare the legal, political and societal groundwork for the full-on abortion ban they desire.

As for Bush, he got two Supreme Court appointments, both replacing Republican-appointed justices, and an initial pick, Harriet Miers, was rejected by conservatives partly because they feared she wasn’t absolutist enough on abortion rights. The judge they did get, Samuel Alito, replaced Sandra Day O’Connor, who had been relatively moderate on abortion rights. The result was that when a major abortion case came before that court, it upheld an abortion restriction it had overturned several years before. The right has always had its eye on the ultimate prize, which is overturning Roe. With the retirement or death of a single liberal justice, they’re likely to get it, or come close.

Indeed, it’s worth looking at who seems fairly confident that a Romney presidency would change abortion access in this country: anti-choice activists, who passed on him in the primary but have publicly been a united front on his behalf ever since. Just check out this story in Life News noting that “Leading pro-life attorneys like Jordan Sekulow, David French, and James Bopp have confirmed they trust Romney as president when it comes to judges,” and quotes the president of Americans United for Life saying that the impact on abortion law via the Supreme Court would be “bigger than everything else combined, because of the long-term consequences.”

And though the Supreme Court appointments are indeed the most lasting legacy, the president also has other important powers when it comes to reproductive rights, from nominating lower court judges to choosing the heads of the Departments of Health and Human Services, the FDA and the CDC, as well as the attorney general, all of whom have discretion on these issues.

The past couple of weeks have been an interesting exercise in some Republicans running as far as they can from the prevailing stances of their own compatriots, and in Romney’s case, current and previous versions of himself. In Washington state, Republican Senate candidate Michael Baumgartner said he opposes abortion except in case of life endangerment but insisted, “Social issues and abortion isn’t the focus of this campaign. You wouldn’t see me voting to change any abortion laws at the federal level.” Republican Sen. Ron Johnson’s tactic on Sunday was to deny that the issue even matters, that voters care more about Benghazi. “Abortion doesn’t even show up,” he said, and claimed that “it’s not even an issue here in Wisconsin, it doesn’t even move the radar at all.” (Someone should tell Paul Ryan that!)

It’s almost as if they know that their policy aims are highly unpopular with a whole lot of voters.

 

By: Irin Carmon, Salon, October 30, 2012

October 31, 2012 Posted by | Abortion, Election 2012 | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Mitt’s Ever-Slippery Position”: More Bobbing And Weaving on Abortion By Romney

Strangely enough, Mitt Romney’s ever-slippery position on abortion policy, one of the enduringly shameful features of his entire public career, is at the center of an argument that the mean old Obama campaign and the mean old Democrats are lying about Mitt’s positions and denying him his proper mantle of moderate conservatism.

Kevin Drum’s not having any of that:

It’s true that Romney thinks (accurately) that no flat ban on abortion is likely to cross the president’s desk in the near future. So in the sense of trying to figure out what will actually happen over the next four or eight years, it’s probably true that a President Romney wouldn’t have a chance to sign a flat ban on abortion.

But that’s only half of what any election is about. The other half is about what a prospective candidate wants to do. I don’t think the United States will ever return to the gold standard, for example, but the fact that Ron Paul supports it tells me that he’s a crank. That’s reason enough not to vote for him.

Likewise, even if Romney never has the opportunity to sign a nationwide ban on abortion, he’s obviously saying that he’d like to if he ever got the chance. What’s more, Romney probably would get a chance to overturn Roe v. Wade by appointing a Sam Alito clone to the Supreme Court, and he knows very well that this would result in plenty of states flatly banning abortion. This tells me he’s an abortion extremist, and it tells me a lot about who he is. It’s fair game.

Correct. But I’d go further. Aside from Romney’s comment on a hypothetical flat federal abortion ban, which would be obviously unconstitutional until such time as a President Romney stacked the Supreme Court to reverse Roe, he promised in his “My Pro-Life Pledge” ukase published by National Review in the early stages of the nomination fight to “advocate for and support a Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to protect unborn children who are capable of feeling pain from abortion.” That would be a federal version of the state legislation being promoted around the country testing the very margins of Roe by banning abortions before an arbitrary point at which a very small minority of scientists and a very large majority of antichoicers claim a fetus can feel pain.

So looking at the big picture, Mitt Romney’s promised to do everything within his power to restrict abortion rights under Roe, and then everything within his power to get it reversed, all within a “pro-life” position that sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t include exceptions for the incredibly tiny percentage of pregnancies resulting from rape, incest, or direct threats to the life of the woman involved. And this has been his basic position since 2007, or at least as long as Paul Ryan has refrained from public praise of Ayn Rand as his great mentor and become a self-proclaimed Thomist.

It should also be recalled that Mitt has identified himself unambiguously with the argument of conservative religious figures that the HHS contraception coverage mandate is objectionable because it includes “abortifacients,” reflecting the belief of anti-choice ultras that Plan B, IUDs, and even standard contraceptive pills actually kill human beings.

This does not add up to a “moderate” position on abortion, however Team Mitt tries to bob and weave and play the victim.

 

By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 19, 2012

October 20, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“The Republican Party Is Becoming Goofy”: Judge Richard Posner Bashes Supreme Court’s Citizens United Ruling

The American political system is marked by legal corruption in which “wealthy people essential bribe legislators” with campaign contributions, according to one of the nation’s most influential federal judges.

Speaking to foreign educators, Judge Richard Posner told the assembled that the wealthy give lots of money to legislators and that an individual legislator “knows that if he doesn’t promote the interests of the donor,” he won’t get any more money.

Posner is a renowned member of the Chicago-based Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. He is not only the nation’s most prolific jurist-academic, he is seen by some as the most influential judge outside of the nine members of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Posner is intellectually fearless and, increasingly, far from the reflexively conservative thinker that he’s been long seen to be. In a recent National Public Radio interview, he spoke of the “real deterioration in conservative thinking” in recent years. “I’ve become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy.”

Posner has taken a poke at the high court’s controversial ruling before. But he’s taking his disdain for the decision to a broader audience. His latest comments came at a post-luncheon appearance Thursday before visiting Asian legal academics at the University of Chicago Law School, where he remains a faculty member.

Posner left no doubt about his criticism of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United campaign-finance decision. He said, “Our political system is pervasively corrupt due to our Supreme Court taking away campaign-contribution restrictions on the basis of the First Amendment.”

He also didn’t mind naming some names, in particular that of Justice Antonin Scalia, a onetime member of the law school faculty who lectured and taught at the school in February. Posner brought up the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, affirming the right of individuals to have handguns at home for self-defense.

Posner doesn’t think the Second Amendment has anything to do with an individual’s right to bear arms, a basis of the decision for which Scalia wrote the majority opinion.

“That didn’t slow down Scalia,” Posner told his Asian listeners. “He loves guns. He’s a hunter.”

 

By: James Warren, The Daily Beast, July 14, 2012

July 15, 2012 Posted by | GOP | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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