Teddy Kennedy became the lion of the Senate and of American liberalism. His legislative accomplishments have done much to shape the United States into the form he desired. We will be living with, and taking the measure of, his legacy for a long time to come. Certainly in one respect, Senator Kennedy’s contribution to our public life has been indisputably negative. In the role he played opposing the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, Senator Kennedy was responsible for a willfully false and remarkably coarse attack on Bork.
When Ronald Reagan nominated then-D.C. Circuit Judge Bork to the Court upon the retirement of Lewis Powell, Senator Kennedy had prepared to do battle. Anticipating the nomination of Bork or someone like him to fill Powell’s seat, Kennedy aide Jeffrey Blattner had written a statement denouncing the nomination. Immediately following the announcement of Bork’s nomination on July 1, 1987, Senator Kennedy took to the floor of the Senate to make the statement Blattner had written:
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, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is — and is often the only — protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….
Alluding to Bork’s execution as Solicitor General of Nixon’s order to fire Archibald Cox, Kennedy continued:
President Reagan is still our president. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of American. No justice would be better than this injustice.
Ethan Bronner, then of the Boston Globe, told the story of Kennedy’s statement denouncing Bork in Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America. In the book Bronner comments harshly on Kennedy’s statement, though Bronner’s comments do not exhaust the statement’s falsity:
Kennedy’s was an altogether startling statement. He had shamelessly twisted Bork’s world view — “rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids” was an Orwellian reference to Bork’s criticism of the exclusionary rule, through which judges exclude illegally obtained evidence, and Bork had never suggested he opposed the teaching of evolution…
Bronner showed that Kennedy’s false charges against Bork did not derive from some mistake or misinterpretation, but were rather the deliberate acts of a powerful man for whom the ends justified the means:
Kennedy did distort Bork’s record, but his statement was not the act of a desperate man. This was a confident and seasoned politician, who knew how to combine passion and pragmatism in the Senate. Unlike the vast majority of those who were to oppose Bork, Kennedy believed from the beginning that the nomination would be defeated and that the loss would prove decisive in judicial politics.
As Bronner suggested, Kennedy’s unconstrained opposition to Bork’s appointment has indeed had profound effects in the practice of “judicial politics.” It has become something of a template for liberal attacks on mainstream conservatives beyond the realm of judicial politics. The tone set by Senator Kennedy in connection with the Bork nomination lives on in Congress. It also lives on in the mainstream media.
We live in Edward Kennedy’s America not only in the consequential legislation that he sponsored and saw through the Senate, but also in the afterlife of the vulgar political sham on which Senator Kennedy relied to defeat the nomination of Judge Bork.
AOC reminded me of Kennedy’s sham in her borking of Charlie Kirk on the floor of Congress last week. Her statement is posted online here. AOC read it from the pages of a notebook. Whoever wrote it for her — whoever played Jeffrey Blattner to her Teddy Kennedy — demonstrated the same shameless lack of conscience that Blattner deployed against Bork.
At her Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning site, Sasha Stone responds to AOC’s statement in “It Is AOC Who is ‘Uneducated’ and ‘Ignorant’ About Charlie Kirk.” She has also compiled “a video montage of clips and various voices to give Ms. Ocasio-Cortez a better idea of who Charlie Kirk really was.” The video is embedded at the top of her post.
Ms. Stone to the contrary notwithstanding, I think AOC likely knows who Charlie Kirk was and doesn’t care. She was defaming him for her own personal purposes. However, Sasha Stone’s video performs a public service today as Charlie Kirk is to be laid to rest.
