The Supreme Court was America's least damaged institution -- until now - By George F. Will
By George F. Will
Columnist
September 21 at 8:09 PM
The current era of scorched-earth politics began five years after there was, according to Christine Blasey Ford, in 1982, an alcohol-soaked party in a suburban Washington home. There, her 15-year-old self was, she says, assaulted by 17-year-old Brett M. Kavanaugh, who categorically denies this accusation.
On July 1, 1987, just 45 minutes after Ronald Reagan announced his nomination of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court, Ted Kennedy said in the Senate that Bork’s confirmation would mean that “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 schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government.”
America, according to Kennedy and those who vibrated to his bombast, was living on the lip of a volcano, with no secure civil rights. At least none that could withstand the ascendancy to the court of a man whose judicial philosophy resembled that of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the progressives’ pinup who believed in vast judicial deference to majorities. So, Kennedy was asserting that an American majority was eager to extinguish American liberty.
Kennedy spoke just 288 days after he and 97 other senators voted 98-0 to confirm Antonin Scalia, Bork’s intellectual soulmate. Obviously the Bork episode was not about jurisprudence.
Four years after the Senate rejected Bork, it confirmed Clarence Thomas, 52 to 48, after weighing last-minute accusations of past sexual misbehavior — talk, not touching. The next two justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, were confirmed with just three and nine opposing votes, respectively. Since then, however, the five justices confirmed (John G. Roberts Jr., Samuel A. Alito Jr., Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil M. Gorsuch) have had between 22 and 45 votes against them.
All were eminently qualified, but none were more so than Merrick Garland, the shabby treatment of whom was supposedly justified by a terrible and profoundly anti-constitutional idea that fuels today’s conflagration. It is the idea that the selection of justices should be tethered to our never-ending political campaigns so that the court will reflect voters’ shifting constitutional preferences.
more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-supreme-court-was-americas-least-damaged-institution--until-now/2018/09/21/7600e14e-bdc0-11e8-8792-78719177250f_story.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
They are tiring. 
Once in a while, they are useful allies.
