Terry Eastland's comment in the July 23rd issue contains a reasonable
account of the liberal/conservative divide in the Supreme Court in
recent decades. However, the comment goes horribly awry regarding
the failed Robert Bork nomination. Calling the opposition to Bork a
"vicious" campaign is totally out of bounds; more accurate would be to
call it "vigorous", or "spirited", but certainly not "vicious", which is
a slur.
Calling Bork "one of the great
intellectuals in the law" is simply ludicrous. Noone who watched or
listened to his inept testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee
would mistake Bork for a "great intellectual". He repeatedly refused to
answer even the simplest, most basic questions about the criminal law,
using the excuse that he hadn't studied the issue.
But
Bork had more problems than this. He came across in the confirmation hearings as aloof and
unapproachable, turning off even many of his supporters. As Senator
Howell Heflin commented, "He's too professorial".
As
ably documented in Ethan Bronner's "Battle for Justice: How the Bork
Nomination Shook America", Bork waffled over key issues during his
confirmation hearing, repeatedly flip-flopping back and forth. This made
him look hopelessly opportunistic, and called his character into
question. Bronner says that Bork "modified views he had held strongly
and repeated widely for two decades". Bronner adds that Bork's repeated waffling earned him
"the contempt of some fervent admirers".
Not every issue boils down to liberal vs. conservative. Sometimes it is just competent vs. incompetent.
Friday, July 20, 2018
Wednesday, July 18, 2018
The Kavanaugh Nomination
An editorial in The Weekly Standard for July 23, 2018, mentions that Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh was one of the authors of the notorious Starr Report, and describes that document as "a fair, thorough, and nuanced work of analysis".
Renata Adler's article "Decoding the Starr Report", which first appeared in Vanity Fair in December, 1998, and which is reprinted in Adler's book After the Tall Timber, has a completely different analysis of the Starr Report. Adler says that the Starr Report is "an utterly preposterous document: inaccurate, mindless, biased, disorganized, unprofessional, and corrupt". She goes on to call it "a massive document in which it is literally impossible to find information by title, date, alphabetical or chronological sequence, or context of any kind".
She summarizes the information about the Clinton/Lewinsky "affair" in a way that makes Lewinsky look like a complete villain who repeatedly stalked and harassed President Clinton. Her analysis is based on a through reading of the Starr Report, and I suggest that if you don't have the time nor inclination to read the report itself (and who in their right mind does), then you should read Adler's article for the detailed information necessary to understand the misguided impeachment effort launched against Clinton by the right-wingers in the House.
Renata Adler's article "Decoding the Starr Report", which first appeared in Vanity Fair in December, 1998, and which is reprinted in Adler's book After the Tall Timber, has a completely different analysis of the Starr Report. Adler says that the Starr Report is "an utterly preposterous document: inaccurate, mindless, biased, disorganized, unprofessional, and corrupt". She goes on to call it "a massive document in which it is literally impossible to find information by title, date, alphabetical or chronological sequence, or context of any kind".
She summarizes the information about the Clinton/Lewinsky "affair" in a way that makes Lewinsky look like a complete villain who repeatedly stalked and harassed President Clinton. Her analysis is based on a through reading of the Starr Report, and I suggest that if you don't have the time nor inclination to read the report itself (and who in their right mind does), then you should read Adler's article for the detailed information necessary to understand the misguided impeachment effort launched against Clinton by the right-wingers in the House.
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