My former neighbor writes on substack.
Both parties hate each other. Here's where it began.
Guess who was in the middle of it.
RENÉ MARROU
MAY 24, 2024
Joe Biden depicted in a 1987 editorial cartoon as a Native American looking for scalps. Hey, it was another era.
We live in an era of bad feeling in the United States. The nation is evenly split between liberal and conservative, and a glance at any social media site or even the nightly news will show you that neither side has any interest in compromise.
In case you’re wondering, it’s all the Democrats’ fault.
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Oh, both sides say that about the other, but I can prove it. It all started September 15, 1987, when federal judge Robert Bork appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a hearing on his nomination to the Supreme Court. Until then, such hearings had been collegial affairs: senators who were lawyers talking to highly-placed judges who were also lawyers.
In the summer of 1986 the entire Senate had voted to approve Antonin Scalia as a Supreme Court Justice by a vote of 98-0, and everyone knew he was conservative. But when Ronald Reagan, hated by the media and other Democrats, appointed Bork the next year something changed. What changed was Democrats thinking Bork might help reverse Roe versus Wade, that abortion-for-all decision made 14 years earlier with absolutely no connection to the Constitution. You might remember what Teddy Kennedy said about Bork in the Senate:
“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…” and so on. None of it was true and Kennedy knew it, but Democrats needed an excuse to turn against a perfectly respectable judge when they’d unanimously approved his near-twin just a few months earlier.
Robert Bork. Chewed up and spit out.
Kennedy’s feigned shock over Bork’s supposed radicalism were pretty strong words for a guy who’d committed manslaughter 18 years earlier. He left a young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne (Ko-PECK-knee), in a sinking car—-his car, which he’d driven off a bridge into water near Martha’s Vineyard. Kennedy fought hard against an autopsy in the case, which made many observers think the pretty young blonde had been pregnant with his child and Kennedy had decided to take the easy way out. Further speculation was that the 28-year-old Kopechne, an observant Catholic, had refused an abortion. Kennedy, wearing a neck support to seem less guilty, needed his much-cheated-on wife to accompany him to Kopechne’s funeral to help polish his tarnished reputation.
The Kennedys were royalty in Massachusetts; his only punishment was pleading guilty to leaving the scene of an accident when murder charges might have been more appropriate.
You might know the young senator who presided over those Bork hearings—Joe Biden. Even then Biden was desperate to be president—he’d announced his candidacy for the 1988 election only to be swiftly brought down when reporters found he’d stolen part of a speech from a British politician named Neil Kinnock. Biden used the Bork hearings as an excuse to drop out of the presidential race rather than be embarrassed further. Even before the hearings began, Biden announced he opposed Bork, hardly appropriate for someone who headed a committee with members from both parties.
So the suspected killer and proven liar led their cabal of Democrats on a two-week smear campaign of the proposed Supreme Court justice, a highly intelligent jurist whose biggest failing was that he sported an odd beard that made him look like an Amish farmer dressed for a weekend visit to town. Their co-conspirators included Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who’d had to resign from the Senate Intelligence Committee after leaking classified documents to the press, and Ohio’s Howard Metzenbaum, who’d had to return a $250,000 bribe—oops, consulting fee—for helping arrange a hotel deal in Washington.
The committee voted 7-5 to not recommend Bork to the entire senate, thinking Bork would resign. He didn’t, and the entire Senate voted against him 58-42 three weeks later. His replacement was a much younger judge named Douglas Ginsburg, who shared judicial beliefs with Bork. This time Democrats found he’d smoked pot in college, and out he went. Finally Reagan named Anthony Kennedy, a suitably squishy type who would uphold Roe v. Wade. He was approved.
The Bork episode started the vicious interparty attacks we know today, mostly because Republicans didn’t respond quickly and strongly enough to the Bork episode. They still don’t, many of them hoping the Democrats, including the media, will someday start to like them. Donald Trump knows better. He counterpunches every time, which is why he’s now facing felony charges for completely made-up crimes.
During the height of the Bork storm, a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who opposed Bork wrote “Americans expect the Supreme Court to protect minorities, the powerless, those with unpopular views.” If they do, they’re fools who didn’t pay attention in civics class. The Supreme Court exists to protect the Constitution and to make sure federal laws abide by it. Its members are not supposed to decide what laws they like and hand them out. Anybody who thinks it should be some combination grandmother and affirmative action officer is missing the point completely..
At its best in the postwar period, the Democratic Party was almost acceptable, realizing that private enterprise and freedom were what made this country great. Perhaps it was because they didn’t want to be labeled communists. It was a tough time for commies.
The people running the Democratic Party today are dedicated only to seizing power in any way possible. Don’t think there aren’t more dirty tricks to come before November, and even after if they don’t like the election results.
