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Avie Hern's avatar

A few replies to Prof. Bork:

“How do you expect courts to measure political power?”

In an era decades before SCOTUS’s Citizens United decision, political power could be calculated by the dollar, and the government had the right to regulate corporations’ donations to insure that government did not become a wholly-owned subsidiary of those corporations.

“Employees are always free to find better jobs.”

So spoke a tenured-for-life professor who could be fired only for cause.

“Lower prices are good for consumers.”

Companies lower prices for one reason only: to build market share, ideally to the point that they acquire their competitors or force them to go out of business. At the point that they achieve overwhelming control of the market with no serious competitors, they then raise their prices. And raise their prices. And raise their prices.

“Also good for consumers. Large size means lower costs through efficiencies of scale.”

Efficiencies that are then passed on to shareholders in the form of dividends and stock buy-backs, and to top executives in the form of raises, bonuses and stock options. Lower prices do not follow lower costs as darkness follows day.

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Daniel Solomon's avatar

Sorry Robert, but Bork was a dork.

He had been a registered Socialist, worked for the Socialist Party but switched allegiances to Stevenson in 1952. At the time he was living in Chicago, in Stevenson's home state. He became an acolyte of .the Freedman/Ayn Rand school of economics while a student at the University of Chicago.

IMHO his fatal flaw was that he valued economics over everything else. He couldn't rationalize his socialist past and accept the cultural revolution of the '60's. .

He certainly wasn't the first a-hole offered to be a justice. It started when Madison appointed Alexander Wolcott who was rejected.

Abe Fortas, friend of LBJ, became the first Supreme Court justice to resign under threat of impeachment. LBJ tried to name him chief justice, but conservative senators mounted a filibuster using as a wedge issue Fortas’ acceptance of a $15,000 fee for a series of university seminars. When supporters could muster only 45 of the 59 votes needed to end debate, Fortas asked the president to withdraw his name — becoming the first nominee for that post since 1795 to fail to win Senate approval. Fortas resigned after it turned out in 1966 Fortas took a secret retainer from the family foundation of Wall Street financier Louis Wolfson, a friend and former client subsequently imprisoned for securities violations. The deal provided that in return for unspecified advice, Fortas was to receive $20,000 a year for life. Embarrassed, disclosure of the retainer effectively ended Fortas’ judicial career.

Nixon appointed Haynsworth, opposed by a coalition of Democrats (possibly in retaliation for the Republicans' rejection of Fortas as Chief Justice), Rockefeller Republicans, and the NAACP. He was alleged to have made court decisions favoring segregation and of being anti-labor. Nixon nominated Carswell for the Supreme Court in 1970 after the Senate rejected his nomination of Clement J. Haynsworth in a battle over ethics and civil rights. The Senate rejected Carswell after reporters uncovered a speech in which he endorsed racial segregation as a legislative candidate in Georgia..

The Dork's supporters knew all of this. Ironically, many of them were and continue to be culture warriors. He opposed legalizing abortion, and the one-man, one-vote principle. He initially opposed what became the 1964 law guaranteeing blacks access to public accommodations, a keystone of the civil rights revolution. And he later defended Virginia’s poll tax, dismissing complaints that the tax discouraged black voting on the grounds that the tax was too small to have “much impact on the welfare of the nation.” So much for his socialist past.

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