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Biden Over Bork: The Big Decision 35 Years Ago
There was a confrontation in 1987 between Joe Biden and Robert Bork. Bork gave honest and straightforward answers to questions during his confirmation hearings. Whether a right to privacy existed or was intended in the Constitution was a big issue. Biden said there was and Bork said there was not. The right to privacy was a big part of the Roe v. Wade decision that brought the issue of abortion under federal purview. Robert Bork was also an advocate for interpreting the Constitution using only the original intent of the founders. The only way I can think of some of the votes when I look again at who cast them is that it puzzles me.
I think this failure to confirm Robert Bork in some ways opened the floodgates and has given us the culture and government we are living with today. We didn’t get Bork on the Supreme Court and we got Biden as President. And now we have had a Supreme Court rejection of Roe v. Wade.
Robert Bork later wrote Slouching Towards Gomorrah, in which he describes the cultural effects of the sixties revived in the eighties leading to a revival of the sixties cultural mentality in Bill and Hillary Clinton. If you have access to this book, there is an Introduction — in my version, it runs 13 pages — that gives a very good description of the cultural forces operating to divide us so completely in our politics today. He calls the Left’s posture Modern Liberalism and uses Radical Egalitarianism and Radical Individualism to describe what has displaced Equality and Liberty in our lexicon when discussing political issues.
I have lived through and experienced all of what he describes in the book.
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Your math is wrong. Reagan won in 1980 and 1984. HW won in 1988 and lost in 1992. Dole lost in 1996. W won in 2000 and 2004. McCain lost in 2008, Romney lost in 2012. Trump won in 2016 and lost in 2020.
Reagan and the Bushes won 5 out of 6, and won the popular vote 4 of the 5 times. Trump won one out of two, and was lost the popular vote each time, first by 3 million votes, and then by 7 million votes.
If DeSantis wins in 2024, Trump will be forgotten, because DeSantis is smarter than Trump, and doesn’t make all the stupid mistakes Trump makes. If Trump wins the nomination in 2024, he will lose the general election, and will be remembered as a loser, having lost the House, the Senate, and the Senate in Trump’s only term, for the first time for a Republican since Herbert Hoover in 1932.
You have time to read fiction books, but you put zero effort into understanding public policy and the way the system works now. See #4 and #5 and #16.
This is exactly right. He won’t look at one thing about this.
There was a poll of Ricochet members on October 27, 2022. There were 20 votes for DeSantis, 7 for Trump, a couple of Trump-DeSantis, and one vote for Rand Paul. See https://ricochet.com/1329810/informal-poll-trump-vs-desantis/#comments.
When Ricochet is tired of Trump and is “Ready for Ron” that signals that Trump’s time is over. Plus, recently, whenever there was a spirited race against an incumbent president, those Presidents lost the general Election, such as Gerald Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter in 1980, and H.W. in 1992. I don’t see DeSantis backing down. If DeSantis backs down, I don’t see Christie backing down. If DeSantis and Christie back down, I don’t see Hogan backing down.
Even if Trump wipes out DeSantis, and/or Christie, and/or Hogan, I see Liz Cheney aiming to knock out Trump in the general election, not so that she wins, but so that there is no chance that Trump can ever get close to the White House again. Liz Cheney was asked by McConnell to run for the Senate in 2020, when Mike Enzi’s term expired. She declined, as the Number 3 Republican in the House, reportedly hoping to be the Speaker some day. Since January 6, 2021 Liz Cheney has been a heat-seeking missile aimed at Donald Trump, and then also at Kevin McCarthy after McCarthy kissed Trump’s ring at Mar-a-Lago. Liz Cheney has dedicated her professional life to stopping Trump; what makes you think she would change her mind now?
Is Liz Cheney willing to blow up the Republican Party to knock out Donald Trump? Well, she was the Co-Author of the ten charges against Trump that I outlined in Comment 17, or do I have to repeat them again? It sure looks like the January 6th Committee has devoted itself not only to keeping Trump from returning to the Presidency, but to having him be prosecuted. Trump is facing a gauntlet from the Georgia Criminal Case to the New York AG’s case against the Trump Organization and Jean Carroll’s defamation case. Am I willing to do whatever I legally can to knock out Donald Trump? After voting for my first Democrat for President in 48 years in 2020, the answer is yes.
You can win with DeSantis or lose with Trump in 2020. The choice is yours.
No, you’re just not thinking, even going by your own cherry picked candidates. Reagan and the Bushes lost 4 out of 9 races. Reagan lost in 76. Bush Sr. lost in 80 & 92. Jeb Bush lost in 2016. If you’re looking at performance, count the losses as well to come up with a win/loss ratio. That’s 55% if your looking at wins, that’s pretty middling.
Trump won in 2016, and I know you don’t count 2020, but that’s still 50%. Just as middling. But he still can beat anyone in 2024. Even your man, Biden.
And you never mentioned Dole McCain or Romney so I didn’t count them in with Reagan and the Bushes. If you did that the win/loss ratio would be only 5 wins out of 12 races, a win/loss of 42%, to Trump’s 50%.
It’s still silly of you to do this, but comparing win/loss ratios to support “who’s party” it is is ridiculous.
Especially because all of your guys are either past running or are named Romney.
I was counting General Elections not nominating contests. Reagan, HW and W won the general election 5 times out of 6, and won the popular vote 4 of those 5 times. Trump won the Electoral College once in two races and lost the popular vote by 3 million and 7 million votes.
By the way, have you noticed that the large majority of witnesses before the January 6th Committee are not only Republicans but are Republicans who were in Trump’s Administration? Do you think that they will have something to say about Trump in 2024?
You can win with DeSantis in 2024 or lose with Trump. The choice is yours.
Biden’s treatment of Bork and Thomas was long before Trump enter the scene – anyone who lived through it knew he was a demagogue who should never become president
Gary, listen to the Michael Knowles interview of Mike Lee. Evan McMullin is evil. Everybody behind him is evil.
That is my point. If one votes on character, there is no reason to vote for Biden.
That is different than not voting for the other guy.
And voting for Biden and actively supporting him is something else.
Like you said, the sun rises in the East, and anyone who voted for Biden opted for this.
To be fair, I think he is referring to voting FOR Biden. Sitting out the vote is one thing–actively promoting the leftism of the Ds is another.
So, in the face of such facts, you sat the election out, right?
This is all true. As much as I love Mr Trump, he’s toxic, he’s unelectable. His losing in 2024 would be catastrophic. Time to move on to a winning candidate.
Gary writes a lot of silly, frustrating comments, but he is 100% right on this one. We need a candidate who will bring all the Gary’s back to the fold.
Biden on Bork was terrible behavior.
Trump after the 2020 election and then January 6th was far, far worse.
Yes, Trump losing in 2024 would be catastrophic. But anyone else winning would be equally catastrophic as well.
There’s no one out there who has the will to do what Trump has tried to do. Trying to elect anyone else to try to do what Trump tried would be similarly ineffectual in that they would get the same treatment from the “Intelligence Community” and its subservient Press that Trump got. Electing anyone else who doesn’t try to do what Trump tried to do would merely be coerced or coopted and play along with the PTB, which would be suicidal for the country.
So you’re probably right that Trump losing in 2024 would be catastrophic.
This is an interesting commentary. The first thing that entered my mind was with Trump’s loss in 2020 we got almost the worse case I could imagine. Only Hillary would have topped it. I was impressed with how well, Trump handled all of what was thrown at him during his Presidency, much of it criminal from within the federal bureaucracy. Much of that influence has be reinvigorated through the Biden Administration, not by Biden personally. Those people behind him have demonstrated they are capable of two things, complete failure at governing and able to instill fear in the people as shown by the pandemic.
I just want to see the election process carried out with integrity. I’ll take my chances with efforts before then to build support for Trump if he chooses to run. If the people decide to act stupid and continue what we are seeing now, so be it.
I was impressed with how poorly he handled it. If PDT had handled it well, we would not be where we are today.
This is the Presidency we’re talking about.
There are a bunch of NeverTrumpers out there, at least enough to swing the last election. After January 6th, there are even more “NeverAgainTrumpers” who voted for Trump but never will do so again, beginning with Liz Cheney who voted for Trump twice, but now is unalterably opposed to him.
You can get Trump policies without the Trump baggage with DeSantis and a number of other Republicans.
Let’s win in 2024 with a candidate who is not radioactive and repellant to so many people. Remember, Moses did not enter the Promised Land. Trump is not electable in 2024.
Biden as chairman lost control of the judiciary committee in both the Bork and Thomas hearings. Kennedy launched his surprising attack on Bork and the Dems followed lockstep. Biden had been chair for eight years by the time of the Thomas hearings and should have been more established but Simon and Metzenbaum ran rings around Biden, driving the attack with leaks. Most committee chairs develop more control over time. Biden never did. Then and now he just goes with whatever he thinks is expedient in the moment.
When he championed the Violence Against Women Act, essentially federalizing existing criminal law, the federal judicial conference expressed mild opposition (they don’t lobby and only opine on matters directly related to courts and rules of procedure) because they feared attempts to drag messy divorce cases into federal court via ancillary and pendent jurisdiction. Biden was furious. He saw this bill as his signature achievement and threatened reprisals.
Yes. I never supported Trump until he got the nomination because I thought his lack of experience in the political arena would hinder him and it did. I think mostly where he was inadequate was exactly that, mainly related to staffing and unstaffing key positions in his administration. On most policy issues he did fine.
But your Liz Cheney, running on a NeverTrumper platform, lost in her primary. And she lost bigly. She lost far worse than any incumbent member of congress ever.
It’s delusional to even try to spin this.
I just felt a weird body rush, like diving into the surf. I think I’ve just become an Only Trumper.
I tell myself that I’d vote for DeSantis or Cruz, or even Pompeo. But I don’t quite trust Pompeo, and yet he’s the only one who’d be able to do what Trump tried to do.
Listening to anybody that analyzes elections or the electorate is a complete waste of time unless that is their full-time job.
Why do you always push the losing strategy?
DeSantis is a good guy, but he barely squeaked out the gubernatorial election against a wildly corrupt cheating male prostitute frequenting meth addict who was later indicted on 21 felony counts.
And running for president, DeSantis would only receive a fraction of the support of the mass of Trump fans.
And he would be working against the anger of the OnlyTrumpers. And if those angry OnlyTrumpers followed your strategy, they would vote for DeSantis’ democrat opponent.
Gary, what is the size of the Mona Charan contingent? The supposed GOP that will hate DeSantis? I can tell you Minnesota Never Trump does not like DeSantis. The principles first types don’t like DeSantis.
IMO, those types are just stupid or it’s a venal lifestyle thing.
IF Trump Endorsed DeSantis, my guess is, many Never Trumpers would bail totally on DeSantis.
This seems very likely to be true.
I don’t think Gary has that many of the dynamics thought through.