Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination

The Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination refers to the 1987 nomination by President Ronald Reagan of Judge Robert Bork to serve as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. The U.S. Senate, with 54 Democrats, rejected his nomination, 42–58.

Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell was considered a moderate, often referred to as a "swing vote" in close decisions. After he announced his retirement on June 26, 1987, Senate Democrats had asked liberal leaders to form a "solid phalanx" to oppose an "ideological extremist" replacement to Powell; Democrats warned Reagan there would be a fight over the nomination if Bork were to be the nominee.

President Reagan nominated Bork for the seat on July 1, 1987. Bork had long been interested in the position; President Richard Nixon promised him the next seat on the Supreme Court following Bork's compliance in the controversial "Saturday Night Massacre" of October 1973. Nixon was unable to carry out the promise before his resignation in August 1974.

Within 45 minutes of Bork's nomination to the Court, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) took to the Senate floor with a strong condemnation of Bork in a nationally televised speech, declaring:

Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.

On July 5, 1987, NAACP executive director Benjamin Hooks described their position on the Bork nomination: "We will fight it all the way - until hell freezes over, and then we'll skate across on the ice." A brief was prepared for Joe Biden, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the Biden Report. Bork later said in his book The Tempting of America that the report "so thoroughly misrepresented a plain record that it easily qualifies as world class in the category of scurrility". TV ads produced by People For the American Way and narrated by Gregory Peck attacked Bork as an extremist, and Kennedy's speech successfully fueled widespread public skepticism of Bork's nomination. The rapid response of Kennedy's "Robert Bork's America" speech stunned the Reagan White House; though conservatives considered Kennedy's accusations slanderous, the attacks went unanswered for two and a half months.

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