As President Obama prepares to announce his cabinet; we began thinking about the upcoming confirmation process. In 2002, the Oxford English Dictionary added the verb “to bork” — to systematically defame or vilify a person, especially in the mass media — to their lexicon. You may remember that Robert Bork’s 1987 nomination to the Supreme Court, and the uproar over his ideology that ultimately led to his defeat, forever changed the process by which the Senate confirms judges. In the 25 years that have followed Bork’s nomination, the two parties have fought increasingly bitter battles over high court picks in an effort to tilt the third branch of government their way. Now there are signs that amid a growing atmosphere of poisonous partisanship, what happened to Bork, who died last week at the age of 85, is beginning to bleed into fights over other Obama’s nominees. Borking, in other words, is no longer confined to the Supreme Court. RIP Robert Bork.
07
Jan 2013
