Robert Bork Deceased

One of the sorriest things about the bipartisan rejection of Robert Bork for SCOTUS was that has always struck me that he felt robbed of something that should have been his. People do get rejected when being nominated for things. If he was rejected because of his beliefs, it was because those beliefs just weren't found to be consistent with that of the nation. If he felt he deserved the seat, one would hope it wasn't because he imagined that his willingness to do dirty deeds on behalf of power should be rewarded. But whose fault was his rejection? The dirty liberal media. Probably for quoting him.

It feels like I just went through my rant regarding originalism in my Scalia post of a couple of days ago and am kind of past it for now, but just to add--one is occasionally surprised by the admiration that conservative legal minds show for the founding fathers in that they have an unwavering faith in their prescience--to have foreseen what conservative legal minds would have wanted them to believe and to have really intended that very viewpoint, regardless of whatever else might have been said or written by yon esteemed  and dead philosophic forbears.

And once a certain caprice enters into one's worldview, one can then be equally appalled that laws would be passed banning "whites only" lunch counters thus:

 “The principle of such legislation is that if I find your behavior ugly by my standards, moral or aesthetic, and if you prove stubborn about adopting my view of the situation, I am justified in having the state coerce you into more righteous paths. That is itself a principle of unsurpassed ugliness.”

And yet think it quite alright if laws were upheld that banned such things as contraception, "obscene" works, or gay sex--because, you know, the state should be able to coerce some people, some of the time, on moral or aesthetic grounds. If those grounds were his--and not at all in some kind of "activist judge" way!  (Which would, apparently, be other those other guys with their Bill of Rights goofiness.)

He is survived by the term "borked", used to mean a rejection of a candidate for some office on political grounds. There are worse legacies he could have had.