Un-Borked

Nice to see this in The Paper of Record:

For much of the nation’s history, the Senate took seriously its role to provide “advice and consent” in the judicial nomination process. Nominees were frequently turned down, for reasons including partisanship and ideology. In 1795 the Senate rejected George Washington’s nominee for chief justice, John Rutledge, largely because of his view on the 1794 peace treaty with Britain.

Only at the start of the 20th century, as executive-branch authority expanded under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, did timidity overcome the Senate. Breaking with historical norms, senators between 1894 and 1968 rejected only one high court nominee. These were the years when the president was regarded, as the political scientist Clinton Rossiter wrote in 1956, as a “magnificent lion who can roam widely and do great deeds so long as he does not try to break loose.”

That changed again amid the turmoil of the 1960s, as conservatives began to resist the court’s activism under Chief Justice Earl Warren. The court handed down transformational rulings on, among other issues, civil rights, religious freedom, freedom of speech and the rights of the accused. At a certain point, Republicans and Southern Democrats found it too much to bear.

When Lyndon B. Johnson named Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall to be the first African-American justice in 1967, right-wing senators of both parties tried to block him. The reason wasn’t just Marshall’s race; it was the way his critics expected him to vote on key issues.

Marshall’s detractors pretended to oppose him as unqualified — a case of “Borking” avant la lettre. This was laughable: Marshall was one of the century’s most accomplished constitutional litigators, having won groundbreaking civil-rights cases before the high court. 

 And, just a reminder, Bork's legal views were always wrong.