Matters of Principle

"Matters of Principle tells the story of how the nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court was defeated in the Senate. We live in a time where all Supreme Court nominations become battles; in 1987, it had been decades since there was a fight over a nomination. Judge Bork, one of the nation’s most prominent conservative jurists, was widely acclaimed as the logical conservative nominee. When he made the nomination, Ronald Reagan was a popular second term president. Almost all the experts said that Joe Biden, who was then the Chair of the Judiciary Committee, would not be able to put together the fight to beat Bork. But he did. And in the end, it was a bipartisan vote—six Republicans voted with most Democrats to defeat Bork’s nomination. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I will say directly, for younger people, the reason we have abortion rights in America is because Joe Biden—along with others—fought the confirmation of Bork, and Anthony Kennedy was put on the Supreme Court in his place. For decades, we had a narrow majority on the Court to preserve abortion rights because Joe Biden won the fight to beat Robert Bork. And Justice Kennedy became the key vote in creating marriage equality, in the Obergefell decision. Joe Biden’s decision to put the Constitution and the wellbeing of our country ahead of his campaign says a lot about who he is. Read Mark’s book, or go online and watch the Judiciary Committee Hearings. The exchanges between Joe Biden and Robert Bork were unscripted, substantive back-and-forth about issues of unenumerated rights, the reach of the 14th and 5th amendments, the equal protection clause and the right to privacy. Bork was considered one of the leading constitutional scholars of the time, a professor of constitutional law at Yale Law School, and a member of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the most prominent court aside from the Supreme Court in the United States. People can watch the exchanges between Biden and Bork and judge for themselves whether or not ‘Sleepy Joe’ is the right nickname."