Verbed

Robert Bork has died. He worked in law and politics for decades, but will probably be remembered as the man who was turned down for the Supreme Court.

It was in 1987 when Reagan nominated him.  No surprise--as an appellate judge and leading conservative intellectual, he was at the top of everyone's short list.  For the same reason, opposition was swift and savage.  A few years before, anyone with Bork's credentials probably wouldn't have had much trouble.  When liberal judges were nominated under Carter, Ted Kennedy and others argued it wasn't the politics that counted, but the qualifications.  And the previous year, Antonin Scalia (the first Italian on the Court) was voted in unanimously--of course, the Republicans lost the Senate in the 1986 elections, and that might have made the difference.

In any case, soon after the nomination was announced, Ted Kennedy was on the Senate floor making his "Robert Bork's America" speech, envisioning a land with segregation, back-alley abortions, rogue police and so on.  It was ugly, but it worked.  Bork didn't do himself any favors with his appearance before the Judiciary Committee (headed by Joe Biden, who'd also spoken out in the Carter years about how politics shouldn't matter), often giving answers that were lackluster and tone deaf--perhaps he didn't see the storm coming.

He lost the vote, 58-42, and his name became a verb. To be "borked" means to be vilified, generally through an attempt to destroy one's political future.  His nomination also might have been a turning point in the process of voting on judges, which to this day remains highly politicized.

Reagan eventually installed Anthony Kennedy in the slot.   Liberals and many libertarians should probably he happy that Kennedy was there rather than Bork--Kennedy was a swing vote in many cases where Bork, likely, would have sided with the conservatives.  But not always.  For instance, it's quite possible Bork wouldn't have expanded Second Amendment rights. (He wasn't much on expanding rights without a very clear textual argument.) On the other hand, not to get too ghoulish, but now that Bork is dead, they probably wish he had been on the Court.

I never met the man, but remember reading some of his stuff in law school.  I can't say I agreed with his general outlook.  Most troubling was his attitude toward the First Amendment, where it seemed he'd be willing to allow censorship of almost anything that wasn't temperate political speech.  Then there was his suspicion of the Ninth Amendment, which, under his jurisprudence, could probably never mean anything.  And in later years, after he'd been rejected, he sometimes wrote quite bitterly about America and modern-day Western culture.  But one should be careful making any conclusions about what kind of Justice he would have been.  Sitting on the Court can change a person, and who knows in what direction he would have gone.

PS  One of my favorite early David Letterman top ten lists was names for Robert Bork's beard:

10. The Chin Slinky
9. The Amish Outlaw
8. The See-Through
7. My Very First Beard - from Kenner!
6. The Lunatic Fringe
5. Senor Itchy
4. The Radioactive Goat
3. Salute to C. Everett Koop
2. Gopher Butt
1. The Babe Magnet