Ideally, all courts, including the SCOTUS would consist of competent, impartial umpires who would call balls and strikes and apply the law without regard to politics or policy. We all know (or we all should know) that's often not how it works in the real world. It shouldn't be that way, but it is, and has been for a long, long time.
Both sides of the political divide know it, and that's why SCOTUS nominations are so bitterly contested. You think Senators were mean to J. Kavanagh? They were. You think McConnell pulled a fast one not even letting J. Garland get a hearing in the Senate for many months and running out the clock? He did. But look into the Bork hearings. "Borked" became a verb! Nothing new.
And Joe Biden was in the thick of it:
"All I have done was point out that the right of privacy, as defined or undefined by Justice Douglas, was a free-floating right that was not derived in a principled fashion from constitutional materials," Bork lectured Senator Biden in the hearings when questioned about Griswold/Roe and the judicially-created "right" to privacy. The politicized leftist legal scholars really hated to hear this coming from the Yale legal intellectual Bork. Also, old hippies were still pissed at Bork for doing Nixon's bidding in the "Saturday Night Massacre."
Whatever your judicial philosophy, if you're being honest, you would regard Bork as a giant in the Constitutional legal field. Closest thing to Bork to sit on the SCOTUS = J. Rehnquist. IMHO, both Kavanagh and Garland are pretty average judges for this level, but both were certainly treated unfairly.
Last edited: May 23, 2019