When McCain loved Robert Bork
I realize 1987 was a while ago (I was 14 during the Bork hearings), and many may have forgotten the judicial record McCain was defending so enthusiastically.
Back in 2005, Jonathan Chait had an item on Bork that is no longer online.
The funny thing is that the memory of the campaign to demonize Bork as a right-wing nut has grown stronger even as the intervening years have shown quite clearly that Bork is, in fact, a right-wing nut.
The most famous hyperbolic charge against Bork — one which has been invoked far more often against Bork’s accusers than it ever was against Bork — was Sen. Ted Kennedy’s claim that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters,” etc., etc.
This was far from the sort of fair summation of the totality of Bork’s legal philosophy that you might find at a law school seminar. But it wasn’t exactly false either. Bork had criticized the portion of the Civil Rights Act banning discrimination in public accommodations, argued against extending the equal protection of the 14th Amendment to women, took an extremely restrictive view of free speech, and so on.
