First by Evan Thomas

First by Evan Thomas

Author:Evan Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-03-18T16:00:00+00:00


Four days later, the O’Connors were packing for summer vacation when they got word that President Reagan had nominated Robert Bork, a conservative judge, to replace Justice Powell. Bork had been the favorite of some of the ardent conservatives in the Reagan administration from the very beginning; in their zeal, the president’s men could not see that his nomination would become a lightning rod for liberals pushing back against the Reagan Revolution.

Like many revolutionary movements, the one led by Ronald Reagan was stronger on rhetoric than reality. Reagan did succeed in lifting the public mood after the economy improved in the early eighties, and his fattened defense budgets and defiant talk about the “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union pushed the Cold War toward an uncertain and possibly precipitous end. But part of Reagan’s genius was to compromise. After shaking his fist at the Kremlin, he began to look for arms control agreements. At the same time, he shied away from insisting on the social agenda of Movement Republicans. He did not push for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion or a “Family Protection Act” in Congress that might have threatened the progress of women’s rights. Rather, he preferred to work through Supreme Court appointments. The true-believer conservatives at the White House and Justice Department began looking for judicial nominees who would push back against the liberal activism of the Warren Court—and, as it happened, be more reliably conservative than Sandra Day O’Connor.

One of the great powers of the presidency is the opportunity to fill openings on the Supreme Court. In theory, a president can reshape the Court in his or her own ideological image. The reality is rarely so neat or predictable, but with the retirements of Chief Justice Burger in 1986 and Justice Lewis Powell in 1987, President Reagan had a chance to push the Court rightward by finding more dependable and forceful conservatives than the clumsy Burger and the courtly Powell.

The year before Powell resigned, President Reagan had chosen Antonin Scalia to take Bill Rehnquist’s seat when Rehnquist moved up to chief justice, replacing Warren Burger. Bork and Scalia, judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, were both darlings of the conservative movement, outspoken in their opposition to the liberalism of the Warren Court. President Reagan had picked Scalia before Bork “for actuarial reasons,” recalled Ken Cribb, the top assistant to Attorney General Ed Meese. “Scalia was ten years younger and smoked cigars, not cigarettes.”

Bork’s appointment “will mean that SOC will have three conservatives to her right,” John wrote in his diary that night, meaning Rehnquist, Scalia, and now Bork. “She had predicted several years ago that appointments to her right would end up putting her in the middle of the Court. The big impact of the Bork appointment will be on abortion. Presumably, his will be the fifth vote that will overturn Roe v. Wade.*2 It will be interesting to see how the pro-choice groups fight the Bork nomination,” John wrote, with understated prescience.11



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