I’m not a strict Constitutional originalist like Bork. I see no way that black Americans could have had their civil rights restored to them in the 1950s and 1960s without the action of the Federal Government overruling the segregationism of state and local governments in the Deep South.

But just what are the powers of the Federal Government versus the states and localities where issues of individual rights are concerned has always been a difficult issue; there have been scores of Supreme Court rulings on it. For liberals to debate conservatives on this before the TV cameras during the Bork hearings would have been a great teaching movement for Americans.

Instead, liberal politicians like Kennedy chose demagoguery and smear tactics–perhaps because they didn’t think they could convince the public on the basis of their arguments.

Just as they’re doing now, with the health care issue. It’s been amusing to hear liberals at town hall meetings complaining that conservatives aren’t interested in debating with them–when they never wanted ANY debate in the first place. They wanted ObamaCare rammed through Congress in just 4 months with virtually no public debate whatsoever.

Only after the Town Hall protesters stopped ObamaCare in its tracks, and the public and politicians began to REALLY debate ObamaCare openly, are liberals wringing their hands.

And in any case, it’s irrelevant, because NO ONE has shown ANYTHING in Bork’s writings that could even support THAT goal of creationists.

What Kennedy hated about Bork was that Bork was a doctrinaire Constitutional originalist. And if the Supreme Court followed Bork’s arguments, they could strike down any new liberal social engineering as unconstitutional. In a time when Reaganite conservatism was on the ascendancy, liberals were scrambling to preserve the Supreme Court as a countervailing force. And they were prepared to do it by smearing conservative Supreme Court nominees.

Just setting the record straight, as usual.

If it were used properly, the verb “to Bork someone” would mean to read his writings and draw logical conclusions.

a) right on point about the Dover case. Though there are other examples – eg the Kansas School Board voting to outlaw mention of Darwin in their curricula in the late 90’s.

What I think was safe to say about Bork is that he wouldn’t have upheld any challenges to incorporation of religious teachings into the curricula, even when done so at the expense of scientific consensus as in the case of evolution. Bork rejected all three parts of the three-part test defined in Kurtzman for evaluating First Amendment violations – 1) the government action must have a secular purpose; 2) its primary purpose must not be to inhibit or to advance religion; 3) there must be no excessive entanglement between government and religion. On the latter part, Bork argued “it is impossible to satisfy … government is inevitably entangled with religion”.

I don’t see how a successful challenge to a state education board which mandated replacement of evoluationary teaching with creationism could be mounted under Borks views.

b) I’m with you on the edit function. Particularly when there’s no preview function.

c) I wholly agree with you on the attractiveness of NM being the generally civil tone, and the meeting place in the center. There are conservatives here who seem to believe the pathway for the Republican Party to retake the majority isn’t to modify the dominant ideology to appeal to a broader spectrum of people … but rather to just yell louder. These people are bothered not only by posters who offer liberal opinions, but even by posters who offer centrist opinions on certain topics, defenses of the majority opinions in America.

To the extent that right-leaning ideas can be offered by various authors here and tested by commentors across the ideological spectrum, I think this can only help those authors improve those ideas. It’s a tribute to Frum that he attracts this spectrum, and that we don’t see censorship or banishment on ideological grounds (I’m always fine with those measures being implemented if a commentor is outright abusive or offensive in their comments). Go to Redstate and make some liberal arguments, and you’ll quickly be removed from the board, no matter how civil your tone. Go to Kos and make some conservative argument, and you’re going to get buried under a pile of aggressively negative responses. Here, there is room for dialogue.