Robert Bork Dead: Former Solicitor General And Supreme Court Nominee Dies At 84

12/19/2012 Robert Bork, a former solicitor general perhaps best known for his controversial Supreme Court nomination which failed in 1987, died Wednesday due to heart complications, PJ Media and National Review report. He was 84. Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, only to be eventually rejected by the Senate after contentious debate. This story is developing. Check back for more updates...

http%3A//www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/19/robert-bork-dead-dies_n_2329553.html

Can you imagine all the damage he would have done if he sat on the SC? Enough we have the idiot Thomas taking up air space there.
We got Anthony Kennedy instead of Bork, so it worked? But the political capital burned up opposing Bork made it harder to successfully oppose Thomas, since Republicans rightly or wrongly felt "persecuted" from the Bork nomination. I was revolted to read in this article that Scalia (re)converted Thomas to Catholicism. Thomas really is Scalia's lapdog.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork_Supreme_Court_nomination
What's interesting is that it was reported earlier in the year that Bork was going to be Romney's chief adviser on legal issues.
It's like "The Legacy" and all the debts to Ann Romney are coming due. I heard Bork actually choked on a chicken bone, but he didn't even EAT the chicken. He had ham!
[quote]Can you imagine all the damage he would have done if he sat on the SC? He said explicitly in his book that the first amendment should only apply to political speech, and that the government should have the power to regulate anything else. That alone was grounds enough to keep him off of the bench.
Do you think he died of heartbreak because he never could figure out how to get Daniel Inouye into a concentration camp?
If you check out some of his books and writings, he was a typical conservative fundie who wanted to roll back the clock on cultural issues, gays etc.
People are talking shit about him on CNN's FB page right now and the freepers are coming out to his rescue.
The belief was that if Reagan had nominated him first instead of Sandra Day O'Connor, he would have sat. He was often asked for his opinions on various topics and one that stood out to me was the Rodney King policemen acquittal. He was surprised by the verdict because he felt the videotape was very conclusive.
He was borderline illiterate. Republicans have yet to face up to the truth: nobody with an above average IQ would associate with them.
[quote]He was borderline illiterate. ???
Hell just gained a new demon!
I was really young around the time of the hearings to confirm, but wasn't there controversy around his race (black heritage)? Or was he a Klan member? There was something like that going on. Yes, I know I can google it, but I like you guys more.
Cause for celebration: one less lawyer in America today!
Sonia%20Kagan%20Alito
We're all very fortunate he wasn't confirmed. It's a close enough shave that he was Romney's judicial adviser. The pretzels he could make of logic to support his prejudices were astounding.
He would have made it on the court if he had shaved off that goofy little beard.
Now HE was most likely suffering from the Autism Spectrum.
they say you should only say good things about the dead.
I've never understood why the people in that post aren't arrested for solicitation.
R19 also is surprised Sacha Baron Cohen is in the House of Lords! (Why, BTW IMHO is one hawt man!)
Yay!
Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon have prepared a throne of lava for him.
Cheney's Next
Did I see that correctly? Is Sacha Baron Cohen in Les Miz?
W&W for R6. You know if he could have he would have. R13, Bork was very right-wing. He and Dick Cheney were obviously from the same gene pool, the one in their old-style Republic rich white men only country club strata.
Happy reincarnation, Mr Bork! May you be poor, dark skinned, gay, and female somewhere in the 3rd world so that you can learn some humanity on your next trip.
Good.
I love the way HuffPo calls this a developing story. He's already dead - what the hell else is going to happen?
[quote]Can you imagine all the damage he would have done if he sat on the SC? Yes, I can...and I'm glad that's the only place it will ever exist.
The name Bork sounds like a noise someone makes when they vomit.
Thank you, R29. I was wondering how the average 12 year old feels about Bork's death.
I wonder if Romney really was going to confer with him on legal matters? I always assumed that the appointment was just another way of reassuring the far right of Romney's bona fides. Well, thankfully we'll never know.
It's a pity Archibald Cox didn't live long enough to see him die.
R31, Romney also chose Dan Senor, John Bolton and John Sununu as his advisers. It was tantamount to having the Honey Boo Boo mother as the head of Health and Human Services. The people with whom he surrounded himself exemplified the worst of this country, and he was prepared to bring them back. Sickening.
If anyone doesn't know what R32 is talking about, you should.
Point taken, r33. Putting Bork in the context of the other advisers is chilling. I think my assumption was wrong.
r31
Stick a Bork in him; he's dead.
I'm old enough to remember when this freak was nominated to the Supreme Court, and I wondered if he was possibly mentally ill. A strange, paranoid man. This country really dodged a bullet when he didn't get appointed.
No problem, R30, you Freeper swine. Now run along and go back to blowing your Log Cabin filth. Ultra-conservative filth like you is naturally meant to blow other human filth, not snivel on DL. Just thought I'd give you some helpful advice.
börk börk börk
Den%20Svenska%20Kocken
[quote]"Compassion, if nothing else, should urge us to avoid the consequences of making homosexuality seem a normal and acceptable choice for the young." [quote]" If same-sex marriage passes I think we'll become much more accommodating to man-boy associations" --Robert Bork, hater of gay people.
[quote]they say you should only say good things about the dead. He's dead. Good.
Was he wearing his swan gown when he dropped dead?
A.%20Scalia
Who's in charge of removing his porn?
R2, try as you might Kennedy is not Bork. I'm not too crazy about defending Kennedy but your equivalent is for the most part false. Bork is like Scalia. Brilliant but always wrong.
He was a man of intellectual fortitude. What exactly have those who criticize this great man done in their lives that matched even 1% of what he's done. He will be missed.
Your breasts are so shiny, R45.
For gay rights, R2, Kennedy is a million times better than Bork. Completely no comparison at all.
For a second I thought it said Bjork died!
R38 has a tenuous grasp on mental health. Making fun of someone's name does not make you progressive or enlightened, numb nuts.
Many of us are Republicans and don't need to be insulted when we come here. Thank you.
LOL, you may decide what you WANT, but we decide what you NEED, bitch. And if you try sometime, you just might find you get what you NEED. Which is a vicious slapping.
[quote]Many of us are Republicans and don't need to be insulted when we come here. I weep a sea of tears for your suffering
starving%20Darfur%20orphan
No, you stuck-up, bitch R49. It just means I'm having lightweight fun with a homophobe's ridiculous name. And I LOVE to verbally abuse self-righteous, stuck-up, highbrow bitches like yourself. You ultra-conservative Freeper arachnid vermin are sooo easy to spot. Who the fuck else but a raging, homophobic conservative would actually sneer and bitch because I made fun of a homophobic bigot's name? Aren't you late for your appointment of teabagging more Reagan cronies before crawling back up your own asshole, you little Log Cabin whore?
[quote]Many of us are Republicans and don't need to be insulted when we come here. Either lurk quietly or take your lumps like a good little troll.
Helpful note to lurking, Freepers/Log Cabin cancer-deserving sewer-residue who are clearly too stupid to understand this simple concept: if you make some sniveling, whiny, haughty issue over the fact that I MADE A MOTHERFUCKING JOKE ABOUT BORK'S NAME, you're outing yourself as the right-wing, radical Reagan-rentboygirls that you are. And as such, you ultra-rightists deserve to have your assholes impaled on an Inquisition torture device called the "Judas Cradle."
R38 I just wanted to repost this in case anyone missed it. He read and read until somebody finally said something conservative, then he exploded with his DL wit. Masterfully done, I thought.
Isn't the accuser in the Coke can incident a lesbian?
Awwwwwww, you can tell R56 is the butthurt republican homophobe swamp-dwelling, slithering millipede (who lives in disintegrating old tree stumps) I verbally annihilated earlier. Listen, folks, this grouchy macho-butch really is smart enough, I promise I can smoke out Freeper homophobes even stoned/drunk. I kicked a giant dent in this Freeper's gas-giant-sized ego, I mentally ruined his Log Cabin parasite life in merely 1 or 2 posts and he STILL has to pout, sulk and snivel about it like a little mangirl bitch with no balls whatsoever. Remember, HE'S the one who started bitching just because I cracked a minor joke about Bork's name!!!!! Jesus-fucking-Christ on a bicycle, you are absolutely one of the most TYPICAL Republican, perpetually-butthurt Log Cabin conservatives I've ever seen in my life of dealing with white trash of this magnitude. Every word of diarrhea that spills out of your well-trafficked $2 whore asshole screams, "SNIVELING REPUBLICAN GAY." Also, I notice that a nightcrawling imitation of biomatter like you NEVER overtly denies being a conservative. Are you Freeper/Log Cabin monstrosities truly this stupid that you don't know how easy it is for many of us to see through your utter spoiled-brat arrogance and parasitic natures?
I ate Robert Bork's excrement.
R45/50
All born into this world have an obligation in some way to bring joy to the world. Some do it with their arrival, others with their departure.
OyVey
Uhhh, that wasn't a rhetorical question, folks. I would still like a true, honest answer: who the fuck BUT an ultraconservative, Bible-masturbating, self-loathing Log Cabin SICK piece of shit would possibly be offended simply because earlier, I cracked a mild joke about Bork's regurgitation-themed surname? And Mr. Bork Vomit-Sound was legendary for his homophobia. Ergo, only a homophobe would object to me associating Bork & his birth-defective, sister-fuckuing fans as noisy human vomit. QED.
Bork didn't get confirmed because he was deemed unacceptable. But Clarence Thomas DID get confirmed, although he was every bit as revolting and right wing as Bork. Now why how did that happen? I never could figure that out. It's been said frequently that Thomas is a pitiful excuse for a Supreme Court judge who votes the same way as Scalia on everything. So how the hell did he get confirmed? Is it because he whined so much about being "lynched" that the tide turned in his favor? At any rate, he's as reprehensible as Bork ever was.
In '73 he fired the Watergate Special Prosecutor when his two superiors in the Justice Department refused to obey Nixon's orders to do so. He was our Roland Friesler (look it up).
Interestingly, Bork hired Robert Reich.
One more conservative lawyer in hell. Good riddance.
R61, you've been Borked by the DL.
Meanwhile I'm still alive bitches!
Harriet%20Miers
Now if Justice Scalia would die, President Obama can appoint a young liberal and change the balance.
Pray for Scalia...life is just too burdensome or him, and there's that place waiting for him in hell. I suggest we start a prayer circle. "Dear God, please send Justice Scalia into the netherworld via some horrible cancer that will melt off his face...slowly. Love, your children on Earth".
We desperately need actual dead supreme court justices.
Quite surprized to learn he had a heart to get complications.
R70, yeah we do! Scalia and Thomas most of all. Choked to death with steel dildos.
Good Riddance. Now if only Scalia and Thomas could follow his lead.
I recently heard Fran Lebowitz being interviewed on NPR and she was very funny talking about how Supreme Court justices live longer than anyone else on Earth.
[quote]But Clarence Thomas DID get confirmed, although he was every bit as revolting and right wing as Bork. Now why how did that happen? He just barely made it. I think the vote was something like 52-48.
Thomas made it because he wasn't as openly disdainful of the senate (until Anita Hill) and because he didn't have the paper trial. Bork was a loudmouth.
Jeffrey Toobin's "obituary" for Bork in the New Yorker is a thing of beauty. Here's the whole thing: 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. Bork was born in 1927 and came of age during the civil-rights movement, which he opposed. He was, in the nineteen-sixties, a libertarian of sorts; this worldview led him to conclude that poll taxes were constitutional and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not. (Specifically, he said that law was based on a “principle of unsurpassed ugliness.”) As a professor at Yale Law School, his specialty was antitrust law, which he also (by and large) opposed. Richard Nixon appointed Bork the Solicitor General of the United States, and in that post Bork showed that he lacked moral courage as well as legal judgment. In 1973, Nixon directed Elliot Richardson, the Attorney General, to fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor. Richardson refused and resigned in protest, as did his deputy William Ruckelshaus. Bork, the third-ranking official in the Justice Department, had no such scruples and thus served as executioner in the Saturday Night Massacre, to his enduring shame. In 1981, Ronald Reagan nominated Bork to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and then, six years later, to the Supreme Court. To his credit, Bork gave honest and forthright answers to the questions posed by the senators on the Judiciary Committee, which was led admirably by then Senator Joseph Biden. Much of the questioning focussed on Bork’s long-held belief that the Constitution does not include a right to privacy. As one of the creators of the “originalist” school of constitutional interpretation, Bork asserted that since the framers did not use the word “privacy,” that value was not reflected in our founding document. Accordingly, he opposed such decisions as Griswold v. Connecticut, which said states could not ban married couples from buying birth control, and Roe v. Wade, which prohibits states from banning abortion. He promised the senators he would reflect those views as a Supreme Court Justice. It was said, in later years, that Bork was “borked,” which came to mean treated unfairly in the confirmation process. This is not so. Bork was “borked” simply by being confronted with his own views—which would have undone many of the great constitutional landmarks in recent American history. As Senator Edward Kennedy put it in a famous speech on the Senate floor, “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, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, [and] writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government.” Was Kennedy too harsh? He was not—as Bork himself demonstrated in the series of intemperate books he wrote after losing the Supreme Court fight and quitting the bench, in 1987. The titles alone were revealing: ”The Tempting of America,” “Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline,” and “Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges.” One of his last books may have summed up his views best. Thanks in part to decisions of the Supreme Court—decisions that, for the most part, Bork abhorred—the United States became a more tolerant and inclusive place, with greater freedom of expression and freedom from discrimination than any society in history. Bork called the book, accurately, “A Country I Do Not Recognize.”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/postscript-robert-bork-1927-2012.html%23ixzz2FZ2cEnKG
We (and by "we", I mean ALL citizens of this country) are SOOOOO lucky and fortunate that this man was not seated on the SC!
Kansas%20boy
And yet Reagan is still somehow feted as a great statesman.
I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet. The American Cyanamid plant in Pleasants County, after refusing for decades to hire women, was required in the 1970's to open production jobs to female workers. In 1978, the plant instituted a "fetal protection policy" which barred all unsterilized women between the ages of sixteen and fifty from working with twenty-eight of the twenty-nine chemicals used at the plant; the chemical with which women were allowed to work was lead, and eventually the company offered women workers in that division the option of sterilization if they wanted to keep their jobs. Five women had the surgery done in Parkersburg. October 2, 1978: Willow Island's American Cyanamid plant enforces fetal protection policy In the late 1970s, the company began enforcing a fetal protection policy and, on October 2, 1978, American Cyanamid decided that women could only be exposed to lead. Since workers at the Willow Island plant were required to handle many different chemicals, this fetal protection policy had drastic consequences for women employees. Five women who worked in the plant's pigment department believed they had to be sterilized to keep their jobs. In early 1979, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspected the Willow Island plant and fined American Cyanamid $10,000. OSHA contended the company's fetal protection policy constituted a hazard of employment because it had, in effect, coerced women into sterilization. It also noted that exposure to lead at the plant was equally dangerous to men and should be cleaned up. American Cyanamid ended up shutting down the pigment department. The company successfully challenged OSHA's decision the following year. A review committee agreed to set aside the citation, concluding the fetal protection policy was not a hazard to workers. Meanwhile, the women who were sterilized to keep their jobs sought legal relief and the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers union agreed to help them appeal the case. Separately, 13 women from the plant filed a suit against American Cyanamid, alleging violations of the federal Civil Rights Act. The union's case ended up before federal judge Robert Bork, who, in 1984, found in favor of the company. Bork ruled the fetal protection policy wasn't hazardous because the women had the option of surgical sterilization. The civil rights case was dropped after 3 1/2 years of pre-trial proceedings.
R77, I was going to link to the same thing. Excellent obituary.
R79, idiots and pseudo-intellectuals lionize him. When you have his moronic worshipers screaming about how Obama is a socialist/communist/appeaser knowing knowing full-well some of Reagan's policies/actions were to the left of Obama, then you know not to take them seriously.
[quote]Bork didn't get confirmed because he was deemed unacceptable. But Clarence Thomas DID get confirmed, although he was every bit as revolting and right wing as Bork. Now why how did that happen? Bork told the truth, mostly, about his extremist views. Thomas, and just about everyone else since, lied.
It's because Thomas played the race card, ironically. That comment about congress trying to lynch him. he was very effective at getting the Dems to back off, which was ridiculous. They should never have let him get away with it.
r44 and r47 we're all saying the same thing. Anthony Kennedy is the swing vote on today's court, and Bork would have been buddies with Scalia. Next time I'll include the high altitude cooking instructions, too.
r2
Is he still dead? I think we should keep checking.
Dustin
UPDATE BREAKING NEWS UPDATE! Robert Bork is still seriously dead.
Chevy Chase
That's Generalissimo Roberto Borko to you, Chevy.
I wonder how his poor family is going to keep his tombstone from being seriously defaced, tagged, spray painted with Nazi symbols. With an army of gays pissing on his grave, they are going to have to re-turf it on an annual basis.
Gay Hound Dog Pisser
I guess r87 was the only development in the developing story. Unless Bork offed hisself.
What they meant when they said the story was developing is that at the time a breaking news event is reported about a death like this one, all they usually know is the age of the person and that they've died. Later on the cause of death (cancer, heart attack etc.) and other related details come out.
One of Bork's charming pieces of work: "Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline"
http://www.mises.org/misesreview_detail.aspx%3Fcontrol%3D22%26sortorder%3Dissue
Bork wasn't just an extreme right winger he was a criminal. He broke the law during Watergate. He was worse than Thomas or Scalia. He was a segregationist who was against Brown v Board of Education and wanted the Civil Rights Act overturned. He ruled employers could forcibly sterilize their female employers. Roe v Wade would have been overturned in 1989 (it was upheld 5-4 by Kennedy, Bork's replacement). I've read a couple opinion pieces saying it would have been a good thing if he became a justice because then Obama would have been able to replace him with some lefty... bullshit. IMO if Bork was on the Supreme Court, Obama wouldn't have become President. They would have brought back segregation and Jim Crow laws.
Which Death Triad does he belong to?