I find myself in The Wall Street Journal.

Here's the entire blog post.

"We have full access to everything. We can go everywhere."

That was the repeated statement of the 3 DOJ lawyers — who were described as displaying an "arrogant" demeanor — who were present during the Mar-a-Lago raid, according to an eyewitness quoted in "FBI searched Melania’s wardrobe, spent hours in Trump’s private office during Mar-a-Lago raid" (NY Post).

I'm not surprised that a search extends into a woman's most intimate space — how could searches be effective if the woman's closet were off limits? — but I recognize that this is something that hits onlookers hard. It makes the government seem more brutal if you picture its agents rooting around in the lady's underwear drawer. 

"It’s the main reason why I worked so hard to keep Robert Bork off the Court. It reflects his view almost — almost word — anyway."

"Look, the idea that — it concerns me a great deal that we’re going to, after 50 years, decide a woman does not have a right to choose within the limits of the Supreme Court decision in Casey.... But even more equally as profound is the rationale used. And it would mean that every other decision relating to the notion of privacy is thrown into question. I realize this goes back a long way, but one of the debates I had with Robert Bork was whether — whether Griswold vs. Connecticut should stand as law. The state of Connecticut said that the privacy of your bedroom — you — a husband and wife or a couple could not choose to use contraception; the use of contraception was a violation of the law. If the rationale of the decision as released were to be sustained, a whole range of rights are in question.... who you marry, whether or not you decide to conceive a child or not, whether or not you can have an abortion, a range of other decisions — whether or not — how you raise your child — What does this do — and does this mean that in Florida they can decide they’re going to pass a law saying that same-sex marriage is not permissible, that it’s against the law in Florida?"

 Said President Joe Biden yesterday.

"The fact was, the Senate’s 'advise and consent' was intended, from the start, to forestall the President from remaking the Court in his image."

"The Senate had, for most of its two hundred years, scrutinized the philosophy and politics of nominees—not just their competence, or honesty. And when a President picked a justice for reasons of ideology, it was the Senate’s duty to examine that ideology. Biden spoke for an hour straight, and at the end, no one could lay a glove on him. Mitch McConnell, GOP from Kentucky, actually had written on this subject at law school ... but when he came at Biden, Joe hammered him with history. And Dole, who had to carry the flag across the aisle, had a little speech ready, with a couple of zingers about 'constituent groups' and 'campaign promises.' But he couldn’t really knock down Biden’s point ... so he ended up just insisting that Bob Bork wasn’t such a bad guy. Biden said not a word about Bork (save to note his nomination, in the first sentence of his speech). He was arguing high principle. Tell the truth, he liked the view from high ground—Joe Biden, Defender of the Constitution! Anyway, if he could set the ground rules, he could take the fight to Bork. Through the millions of words that Bork had written or said, Joe Biden would paint a picture of the judge for the American people. That was how he could win the fight. Problem was, he didn’t know how he could paint the judge, or paint him into a corner, intelligibly. Joe had to make it connect. And he would not know ... till he had to make another speech."

From Richard Ben Cramer's book "What It Takes: The Way to the White House" (about the 1988 campaign, published in 1992). President Reagan nominated Robert Bork to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by Lewis Powell on July 1, 1987, and Joe Biden, who was trying to get somewhere in the Democratic presidential primaries, as the new chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, needed to make his mark.

According to Cramer, Biden didn't know what he thought until he spoke it out loud and sometimes not even then. That's what Cramer meant by writing that Biden would not know if he could make the argument intelligibly "till he had to make another speech."

But the fact is, Joe out-argued the purportedly ultra-smart Yale law professor. And, according to Cramer, Joe had a real thing about the Ivy League elite:

Let's look at Ginsburg's language: "I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

That is the form of her dying wish, as told to us by her granddaughter Clara Spera, who is a fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union. It is hearsay, and we don't know for certain that Ruth Bader Ginsburg said those words at all — though of course we assume that the basic idea expressed is something that she did indeed wish. But did she use the verbs "replaced" and "installed"? Is that Spera's paraphrase?

The words sound wrong to me, especially "installed." We normally speak of electing a President. If you look up the words "install" and "president" in the New York Times archive, the relevant hits are about colleges and professional organizations "installing" a president. There, a president is chosen by an elite group, not by the people.

I read through a long page of old NYT headlines and finally arrive at one that looks like it may be a political leader: "Silurians Install President" (April 16, 1963). Who are Silurians?! Is Siluria some country that has escaped my attention all these years?



Click to enlarge and clarify. Key line: "The Silurians is an association of men who have been on New York City newspapers for 25 years or more." Another professional organization, the sort of thing that installs its president.

You see my point. It is a strange and revealing word choice. And if there's one thing you can say about Donald Trump, it's that he was not installed. The 2016 election was a populist expression that gobsmacked the elite. If Hillary had won, it might make some sense to declare that she was "installed."

Ah! And now you see a motivation for Ginsburg's use of "installed." If Biden wins — which is what Ginsburg hoped for (and "a new president" implies) — it really is more of an installation. The Democratic Party elite have been working to install him. It's not his own doing. It was a reaction against the populist expression that had Bernie Sanders winning in the primaries.

When I hear "installed," I think of appliances — dishwashers, refrigerators — that need to be positioned and hooked up by licensed professionals. That resonates with the Biden story... except that no one would install an appliance so superannuated and marginally functional.

And I don't like the use of the word "replaced" either. Ginsburg filled a seat, seat #6, established February 24, 1807. She was the 13th person to sit there. "I will not be replaced until..." suggests a sense that there ought to be a new version of her, someone who will carry on as she would have. But she took over that seat from Byron White. Was there any sense that she was supposed to be like him? She certainly wasn't. The seat belongs to all of us. Just as we control who is elected President, we have a collective interest in that seat, which now needs to be filled.

Justice Ginsburg exercised her own will by holding on to the seat despite grave illness, and there was some ability to choose who would take her place, but the force of nature kept her from completing that task. The Constitution gives the appointment power to the President, and a Supreme Court Justice cannot grab that power from him.

The Constitution has its complicated method for determining who will be President. I won't elaborate on it here, but it does have something to do with what we, the people, want. The last time we cranked through the mysterious process, Trump popped out. It was very weird! But he is the President, and a Supreme Court Justice has vacated a seat.

We can make political arguments that Trump should wait and let us make filling that seat an issue in the election. I'd love to see Trump and Biden debate and give us the question: What kind of Justice we want?

Biden was chair of the Judiciary Committee for so long. Let's grill him about what he did to Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. Let's ask him to show us his list of potential nominees as President Trump has. I think that would be great. But I also think that if the tables were turned and a Democratic President had a Democratic Senate, we'd get the nomination and confirmation quickly and without fussing about inferred principles that have nothing to do with the text of the Constitution.

ADDED: Wikipedia: "The Silurian is a geologic period and system spanning 24.6 million years from the end of the Ordovician Period, at 443.8 million years ago (Mya), to the beginning of the Devonian Period, 419.2 Mya. The Silurian is the shortest period of the Paleozoic Era.... A significant evolutionary milestone during the Silurian was the diversification of jawed fish and bony fish."



But also: "The Silurians are a race of reptilian humanoids in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who.... The first Silurians introduced are depicted as prehistoric and scientifically advanced sentient humanoids who predate the dawn of man; in their backstory, the Silurians went into self-induced hibernation to survive what they predicted to be a large atmospheric upheaval caused by the Earth capturing the Moon."



ALSO: From the OED entry, "install":

1817 S. T. Coleridge Biogr. Lit. I. iii. 60 It is said that St. Nepomuc was installed the guardian of bridges because he had fallen over one, and sunk out of sight....

"In the weeks ahead, we’re going to spend a lot of time going over Brett Kavanaugh’s biography — where he’s from and what he’s written. But that’s not the most important way to understand the guy."

Right. Because Kavanaugh, on his own, is completely boring. A normal person hearing the announcement, got excited for 2 seconds before the name was said, then immediately lost interest and moved on. Kavanaugh is a name we'll see for years, merged with other dull names, in Supreme Court opinions that we won't have thought about all that much, because we'll know how they're going to come out. No surprise. No, gee, I wonder how Justice K thinks about these complexities. The new Justice K won't be someone you need to get to know so intimately.

So David Brooks is taking the right tack here:

Kavanaugh is the product of a community. He is the product of a conservative legal infrastructure that develops ideas, recruits talent, links rising stars, nurtures genius, molds and launches judicial nominees. It almost doesn’t matter which Republican is president. The conservative legal infrastructure is the entity driving the whole project. It almost doesn’t even matter if Kavanaugh is confirmed or shot down; there are dozens more who can fill the vacancy, just as smart and just as conservative. 

A judge should seem boring, right? He should seem like a humble servant discovering the meaning of the law and faithfully articulating it. The great accomplishment (described in detail at the link) was to make the conservative view of law feel so completely normal that a judge like Kavanaugh would bore us, instead of seeming like a monstrous outlier, as we were made to see Robert Bork.

I vividly remember this depiction (click to enlarge):

Bork should have been confirmed, of course, and would have been confirmed if there had been a structure around him to explain and defend conservative judges. Brooks explains how in the years since Bork's defeat that structure has been built. But if that had not been needed, Justice Kennedy — about whose swingable moderation liberals wring their hands today — would never have sat on the Court. All these years, Bork would have staked out the right end of the Court, and who knows how much that would have affected all the other Justices and Presidents? Everything would have been different. Perhaps the Federalist Society would not have grown the way it did. Perhaps Bork would not have died of heart disease in 2012, but if he did, would the President who replaced him have been Barack Obama?

"Elizabeth Warren Is Getting Hillary-ed."

A headline at New York Magazine, for a piece by Rebecca Traister, who does not use the word "Hillary-ed."

What does it mean to "get Hillary-ed"?

I guess it could mean a lot of things, but from the article, the idea seems to be to portray her "as hypocritical and untrustworthy" (because of her personal wealth), and to stress her emotionality. Some right-wing radio guy called her “frazzled” and “triggered,” which Traister calls "highly gendered language." And Warren is portrayed as taking a "doggedly pragmatic paths to advancement" — being one of the "hand-in-the-air Tracy Flicks of the world" that Americans instinctively loathe. The "right wing," we're told, "regards ambitious women as threatening and ugly," while the "left" sees them as "compromised and emblematic of reviled Establishment mores."

However right or wrong any of that is about how opponents attack female candidates and voters react to those attacks and how "highly gendered" it is, there's still the question whether we want to see "Hillary" become a verb. We've seen proper names become verbs. We know what "to Bork" means, because we know what happened to Bork. But what happened to Hillary? She's got a whole tome trying to say or avoid saying what happened. It's called "What Happened." What the hell happened? Sorry, that does not have the makings of a new verb.

Does Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg know what happened? Charlie Rose tried to get her to say: "Do you think sexism played a role in that campaign?" A role. Obviously, it had some role.



So it's unsurprising that she said "I have no doubt that it did." The audience claps and whoops though she's just said essentially nothing.

Rose is sharp enough to know he got essentially nothing and redid his question: "Do you think it was decisive?"

Ginsburg cagily said, "There are so many things that might have been decisive" and "But that was a major, major factor." The first statement absolves her of all responsibility, and the second statement gives those who want a quote a tasty nugget to enjoy.

But Ruth Bader Ginsburg does not know what happened, because no one can really know. It's infinitely complex. Going forward, we need to predict what might happen and try to influence what happens. If we care about getting good candidates and figuring out whom to trust with political power, let's not screw up the discourse with the grotesque verb "to Hillary." Women candidates deserve better than that. We all deserve better than that.

If you care about a female candidate, you're not helping her by encouraging people to think of her as being like Hillary, even if you believe that some attacks on Hillary were unfairly sexist.

"DoggoLingo, sometimes referred to as doggo-speak, 'seems to be quite lexical, there are a lot of distinctive words that are used'..."

"... says Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch. "It's cutesier than others, too. Doggo, woofer, pupper, pupperino, fluffer — those have all got an extra suffix on the end to make them cuter.' McCulloch also notes DoggoLingo is uniquely heavy on onomatopoeias like bork, blep, mlem and blop.... The origin of "bork" itself is less clear, but it's clearly onomatopoeic. It's perhaps most well-known thanks to Gabe the Dog, a tiny floof of a Miniature American Eskimo/Pomeranian whose borks have been remixed into countless classic tunes. Jurassic Bork, The Bork Files, Doggos of the Borkribbean, Imperial Borks — the list goes on and on."

I'm reading "Dogs Are Doggos: An Internet Language Built Around Love For The Puppers" at NPR.com. It's from last April, but NPR.org is featuring it on its front page today. Why? I can think of 2 reasons: 1. NPR thinks people are stressed from all the scary news — hurricane, race-focused protest, Trump — and need something reliably nice nice nice, or 2. The new story "What's Making These Dogs In Mumbai Turn Blue?" is getting a lot of clicks so they went digging back in the archive for something else about dogs.

Speaking of 2 reasons, I was interested in the "doggo-speak" story for 2 reasons, both relating to the infusion of a fun new life into a heretofore negative word:

1. "Bork" — based on the defeat of the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork — has meant "To defame or vilify (a person) systematically, esp. in the mass media, usually with the aim of preventing his or her appointment to public office." That's an OED definition. The verb "to Bork" is actually in the OED. Interestingly enough, the oldest usage plays up the dog-related similarity to "bark": "I think this time the local minorities are ‘Borking’ up the wrong." That's the L.A. Times in 1987. But the usage really got going when Clarence Thomas came along: "'We're going to Bork him,’ the National Organization for Women has promised. But if they succeed, liberals may discover that they have Borked themselves." (1991 New Republic).

2. "Doggo" — this has been slang — in the phrase "lying doggo," meaning to lie low and keep hidden — since the 19th century, where the first usage, according to the OED, was "He had been a guest, after lying doggoh for some time, at one of Blobbs' quiet little suppers." I'm most familiar with the word as it comes up in the Samuel Beckett play "Endgame." Clov has a flea and shakes a lot of insecticide powder into his pants. Hamm asks "Did you get him?" and Clov says "Looks like it. Unless he’s laying doggo." There's then some byplay about "laying" versus "lying," with the punchline "If he was laying we'd be bitched."

IN THE COMMENTS: Earnest Prole said:

Reason 3 for why NPR is featuring it today: It's National Dog Day.

Never heard of it before, but it checks out in Google News. National Dog Day.

Glenn Loury and I resist the resistance to Trump.

In this hot new episode of Bloggingheads (recorded on Friday), Glenn Loury objects strenuously to the effort to treat Trump as abnormal, and I agree. Despite that basic agreement, we find a lot to talk about:



The tags indicate the range of subject matter. The topics listed at the BHTV website are:

The “normalizing Trump” debate
Trump’s desire to keep judges “in check”
Political posturing around Gorsuch and Garland
Should judges infer that Trump wants a Muslim ban?
Glenn defends the Shelby County ruling on voting rights
Ann defends Citizen’s United

Why Jeffrey Toobin is wrong about "How to Stop a Trump Supreme Court Nominee."

Toobin purports to know the trick: acting fast. He extracts that special secret from the story of how the Supreme Court defeated Robert Bork in 1987. As soon as President Reagan announced his pick, Teddy Kennedy scampered up to the Senate podium and delivered a diatribe:

“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, school children could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government.”

But was it Kennedy's speed that doomed Bork or the fact that the Democrats had a majority in the Senate? More importantly, Bork's opponents in the Senate Judiciary Committee — led by Joe Biden — outsmarted him politically. As Richard Ben Cramer put it in his great book "What It Takes":

Bork kept talking about originalist jurisprudence, neutral principles of Constitutional Reasoning, the bankruptcy of the theory of penumbral emanations... while Biden talked about cops in our bedrooms!

It wasn't the speed of Kennedy's initial attack as much as it was the slow dance of luring Bork into talking too much, revealing too much. He said he wanted to be on the Court because he's the kind of guy who views it as "an intellectual feast." The borking of Bork taught a lesson that I have seen reflected in the committee testimony of every Supreme Court nominee who has followed him. They never say too much, never reveal specific opinions about issues that will come before the Court, and always speak in terms of their dutiful adherence to precedent.

It just can't play out the same way again. And quite aside from the smartening up of the nominees to the game of their Senate antagonists and the lack of a Democratic majority in the Senate this time, the people have smartened up to politics. A fear-mongering speech like Kennedy's would not be received the same way today — even if there were a handsome Senator willing to say that kind of thing. Throughout the 2016 campaign, Democrats tried to scare Americans with material like that. It was a key — perhaps the key — reason to vote against Trump, and it happened with that empty Supreme Court seat making the threat as real as possible. And people voted for Trump anyway. Either we — those of us who voted for Trump* — did not believe the scary predictions were true or we — the Trump voters among us — actually want a seriously conservative Justice to take that seat.

And one more thing is very different from 1987. Mainstream media has lost its monopoly, and we bloggers and tweeters stand ready to call bullshit on hysteria and overstatement and one-sided presentation of the issues. Speaking of speed — Toobin's big idea for a powerful trick — bloggers and tweeters are oh-so-quick and if we'd been thrown a slab of meat like Kennedy's "Robert Bork’s America" — speaking of "an intellectual feast" — we would have gorged ourselves.

Now, to be fair to Toobin, he does also talk about something else, something recent, that happened quickly and that had to do with preventing a President's nominee from getting confirmed. When Antonin Scalia died, the Senate Majority leader, Mitch McConnell, immediately said the Senate would hold the opening for the next President to fill. That was not an attack on a specific nominee. Obama only named Merrick Garland a month later. There was never an attack on the man. It was always a pristine procedural point — love it or hate it. I've already mentioned Joe Biden in this post, and I'm about to say "Biden" again. Toobin never speaks the name. The procedural point is called "The Biden Rule." It was articulated by Biden, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, back in 1992.

The quickness of the invocation of the Biden rule had some importance, because it isolated the principle from the name of any particular person. We lived through a presidential campaign with the understanding that the winner would make the nomination. How could quick action against the person — in the Kennedy vs. Bork style — work? We all expect Democrats to denounce whichever person Trump names. A pompous, inflamed speech will either be ignored — as more of the blah blah blah we're so used to now — or it will be picked apart and mocked in social media.

I understand that Toobin has to write these essays for The New Yorker, and I assume he has readers who lap this stuff up, but I consider it deliberately obtuse if not perfectly silly.

_______________________

* That is not meant to imply that I voted for Trump. I have not revealed my vote.

Judge Posner "corrects" his statement that only Justices Ginsburg and Breyer are "qualified" to serve on the Supreme Court.

I blogged the statement yesterday, here. Maybe Judge Posner read some of your scornful comments, because now there's this:

The second correction I’d like to see made has to do with my saying that none of the sitting Justices (plus Scalia) is “qualified” for the Supreme Court except Ginsburg and Breyer. This could be misunderstood to mean that I think the others lack the necessary paper credentials, of which the most important are graduating from a law school and passing the bar exam (though one of our greatest Justices, Robert Jackson, had just a year of law school, and did not graduate). That was not my intention in using the word “qualified” (if I did use it). I meant good enough to be a Supreme Court Justice. There are something like 1.2 million American lawyers, some of whom are extremely smart, fair minded, experienced, etc. I sometimes ask myself: whether the nine current Supreme Court Justices (I’m restoring Scalia to life for this purpose) are the nine best-qualified lawyers to be Justices. Obviously not. Are they nine of the best 100? Obviously not. Nine of the best 1,000? I don’t think so. Nine of the best 10,000? I’ll give them that.

I wouldn't call that a "correction." It's pretty much what I understood him to mean the first time around.

And as long as I'm going back to that, let me explain what I meant yesterday when I related that Posner post to the post quoting Howard Stern saying that Donald Trump was able to do a good Howard Stern Show interview because he got in "the spirit of the show" which is "to talk like real people." I said:

Talking like a real person... then running for office. That's dangerous... unless you're a saintly real person. Most politicians get on-task, self-censoring, and robotic. That's the normal way to stay out of this kind of trouble.  

To get appointed to the Supreme Court you have to control your speech and not give the President's antagonists material they can use against you. You cannot be Robert Bork. That is, you cannot be an outspoken, interesting person like Judge Posner. That's what disqualifies you politically. So there's reason to say that everyone who is really qualified is politically disqualified.

And I do regret using the word "saintly." I think more highly of saints than that, and I bow to Paddy O's comment:

A saint would have even less chance than Trump. A real saint offends all the powerful, so wouldn't even get a chance to stand on a primary stage.

"Who wants to be Obama’s judicial kamikaze pilot?"

Nice column title — for Marc A. Thiessen in The Washington Post. Of course, it assumes Obama's nominee will not make it, and I'm not convinced of that. Nevertheless, it's a risk to be the person who gets thrown out there to the beasts in the political arena. But you may get through it, and if you do, you're there for life, just like Clarence Thomas, who survived a more vicious thrashing than anything that could plausibly happen to this new character. 

The reason I think the nominee might make it is that Donald Trump is the likely GOP candidate for President, and he can't be trusted to nominate a truly conservative person. Efforts at getting a reliably conservative Justice often fail anyway, and I don't expect Trump even to want a hard-core Thomas/Scalia-type conservative. Trump isn't opposed to abortion rights and gay rights and the rest of the things that torment social conservatives. That's my reading. I could be wrong. But my point is: The Senators, thinking about how they want to play out their roles in the Theater of Confirmation, should be able to predict — if and when Trump becomes the Republican nominee — that the next President isn't going to give them an old-time conservative. It doesn't matter who wins the election — Hillary or Trump — there's no one to hold out for.

The GOP Senators should be looking at: 1. The political benefit to be squeezed out of the drama of wielding the confirmation power, and 2. Who Obama actually nominates. Obama may pick someone moderate, because he predicts the GOP Senators will figure out that it's in their interest to take that person and to look good exercising their role in a dignified, elevated fashion. But Obama might predict that behavior and go for someone liberal enough to trigger a bad-looking response from the GOP Senators. What does Obama want more — another person of his choosing on the Court or to muck up the GOP in the fall elections?

That's how I'm thinking. Thiessan, by contrast, thinks that anyone who accepts the nomination is committing career suicide by serving as "Obama’s pawn in an unwinnable fight." Thiessan is obviously in the game himself. I think I'm looking at the chessboard from a more distanced position and seeing quite a few moves and many different outcomes — including the one where a failed nominee gains stature and goes on to write and comment on the legal/political scene in a vigorous, rewarding post-nomination career.

"Librarians in Japan upset after newspaper published names of books that novelist Haruki Murakami checked out as a teenager from his high school library."

A new thread on Metafilter, where somebody says:

This reminds me so much of that scene in Se7en where Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt gain access to John Doe's library check-out list and attempt to use it to profile his behaviour based solely on this list that they've illegally obtained.

And that reminded me of the nomination of Robert Bork to the  Supreme Court:

During debate over his nomination, Bork's video rental history was leaked to the press. His video rental history was unremarkable, and included such harmless titles as A Day at the Races, Ruthless People, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Writer Michael Dolan, who obtained a copy of the hand-written list of rentals, wrote about it for the Washington City Paper. Dolan justified accessing the list on the ground that Bork himself had stated that Americans only had such privacy rights as afforded them by direct legislation. The incident led to the enactment of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act.

Here's the whole Michael Dolan article. Excerpt:

When the list landed in them, I felt as if I held history in my hot little hands, and wondered whether I dared dissect it. Then I remembered A.J. Weberman. Weberman, founder of the school of intellectual discourse known as “garbageology,” was a Greenwich Village loon who spent years stealing Bob Dylan’s trash and subjecting it to the sort of deep-focus scrutiny usually reserved for such as the Dead Sea Scrolls. If Weberman could deconstruct Bob Dylan’s detritus, I finally decided, Dolan could deconstruct Bob Bork’s, even if the trash was cultural and not literal.

The garbageologist’s life may be a sleazy one, but it’s not an easy one. Weberman suffered for his scholarship; Dylan once caught him rooting through the used Pampers and kicked his inquiring butt. Invading Judge Bork’s privacy could get me into trouble if we ever met face-to-face. But then, I’ve seen the man move – he might be in line to vote for reinstating the death penalty, but he’s way too slow to pull a Refrigerator Perry on me. And anyway, the judge indicated during his confirmation hearings that he’s not necessarily a rabid fan of the notion of a constitutional guarantee of privacy.

So let’s get Borkological. Let’s Bork out. Let’s Bork again like we did last summer....

You have the power to change one word in the Constitution.

Pick one word and change it to one other word.

ADDED: After inventing that exercise, I happened upon this old quote from Robert Bork, from his 1987 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

[I]f you had an amendment that says ‘Congress shall make no’ and then there is an ink blot and you cannot read the rest of it and that is the only copy you have, I do not think the court can make up what might be under the ink blot.

Ah, but what if you had to say what was under the ink blot? What would you say?

"The truth is, I have never sat at my desk and thought, 'Today, I shall pen a mighty portrait of coitus!'"

"No, these imaginative encounters seem to creep up on me in the first draft, sort of like when two people fall in love, or lust. One minute you're chatting away about the legacy of Robert Bork and the next you're trying to meld your bodies into one ecstatic pulsating organism. When it's happening on the page, though, things get tricky. We might have the tendency to quickly cover up from the embarrassment of seeing our characters in the buff or else take on the role of salacious puppeteer. The prose can suffer from these reactions, as well as from overly clinical description, or, in some notorious cases, overcooked metaphor. Being caught with your aesthetic pants down can be a writer's worst fear."

From "The Smitten Word: The awkward art of writing about sex," by Sam Lipsyte.

Salacious puppeteer... what a phrase! I had to Google to see if anyone had ever put those 2 words together and....



One minute you're chatting away about the legacy of Robert Bork...

If Sonia Sotomayor's autobiography has nothing at all about law or even politics...

... why would anyone read it?

The book, which covers her life prior to becoming a judge, barely says a word about the Constitution and even less about ideology. Yet one doesn't get the sense that politics were scrubbed from the text; it is rather that the topic isn't of much interest to the author.

That's what a good scrubbing job would do. So there's no bad scrubbing job leaving interesting residue.

One wishes she had shared her intellectual interests with us or discussed the books that captured her fancy or influenced her thinking, since she remarks more than once in "My Beloved World" that the library was a refuge for her as a schoolgirl and later at Princeton. Disclosing the names of books that influenced a childhood wouldn't compromise pending or future cases.

Welcome to the post-Bork world — a "beloved" world? — where judges are dutiful, neutral case processors. The very quality that makes a judge the kind of judge we've come to require — post-Bork — will embody a form of expression antithetical to a good memoir.

"But what 'borking' really amounted to was holding the nominee’s vigorously expressed views up to the light for public inspection."

Says Linda Greenhouse:

In five days of testimony, then-Judge Bork – a former professor of mine whom I liked and respected – had every opportunity to make his case. His ideas were fully aired and considered. By a vote of 58 to 42, the senators, having heard from their constituents, concluded that his constricted constitutional vision, locked into the supposed “original intention” of the framers, was not what the country needed or wanted....

"Reagan's Justice" — an ominous New York Review of Books article about Robert Bork.

I remembered the title of the scary piece (by Ronald Dworkin), which was published in 1984, and I remembered the uber-creepy David Levine caricature that accompanied it:



After Bork got borked, Dworkin got another piece in the NYRB — "What does Bork’s defeat mean? Did the American public reject Bork’s announced philosophy of original intention? If so, what alternative constitutional philosophy, if any, did the public endorse?" — and David Levine drew him again. Look how cute:



Now that he's not a threat, he's a lovable Santa Claus. That's art, baby!

AND: From high(ish) art to low, here's an old Letterman Top 10 list: "Top 10 Names for Robert Bork's Beard":

"Bork, he was the biggest bleeding-heart liberal of us all."

An old University of Chicago Law School anecdote.

And here's a letter Robert Bork wrote to the Wall Street Journal in 2005:

Robert Bork has died.

He was 85.

From the above-linked NYT obituary:

Judge Bork, a bear of a man with a scraggly red beard and untamed frizz on a balding pate who liked to eat, drink and smoke for much of his adult life, handled himself poorly in front of the [Senate Judiciary] committee and failed to give doubters confidence. As Tom Shales, the television critic for The Washington Post, wrote of his testimony: “He looked, and talked, like a man who would throw the book at you — maybe like a man who would throw the book at the whole country.”

See that's what I was just talking about: Liberals used to express abhorrence of law-and-order types.

The NYT obit refers to "the notion that the nominee was somehow unfeeling as a judge." Somehow... a notion... Where, oh, where could it come from?!

This [notion] was amplified when, asked by a sympathetic senator, Alan Simpson, Republican of Wyoming, why he wanted to serve on the Supreme Court, Judge Bork replied that it would be “an intellectual feast.”

And that was it, the worst answer ever given to any question in the history of the United States. Intellectual feast! The feast turned out to be a feeding frenzy for the liberal media. Why, they're still picking kinky reddish beard hairs out of their back molars! Burrrrp! Tasty! What a time! And no Supreme Court nominee has said one interesting thing since. Every single one has promised to be a good little judge who would never ever do anything but serve humbly and modestly deciding the cases according to the law.

You think it was interesting that John Roberts said he saw himself as an umpire, calling balls and strikes? That proves my point! I know, Clarence Thomas, "high-tech lynching," but that wasn't about doing the judicial work, so I'm excluding that from the point, which is that they all learned what not to do from Bork. Presidents learned to avoid even picking someone Borkish, so no one was allowed to look weird, speak quirkly, seem like an intellectual with ideas of his own, it would just be bland blandness served atop a steaming pile of blandness. That is: Not tasty! As a live-blogger of nomination hearings, I want to know: Where's my intellectual feast?

ADDED: When C-SPAN put its entire archive up on-line, the first thing I looked up to relive was the Bork hearings: