Borking is the conservative word you need to know during confirmation hearings
The ultimate red vs. blue term
The verb “to bork” is one of our most reliable political litmus tests.
If you’re a Republican it means besmirching the reputation of qualified nominees in the process of Senate confirmation hearings. If you’re a Democrat, it’s a convenient conservative fantasy used to disparage principled questioning of an official’s record.
The use of bork as a verb dates to 1987 and began before the contentious hearings for the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork had even concluded. Bork was a respected jurist, a law professor at Yale, and had a history of government service, including as Solicitor General and acting Attorney General. Approval by the Senate usually followed a cursory discussion of qualifications. But once Ronald Reagan nominated Bork, Democrats came out swinging. Senator Teddy Kennedy kicked the process off with a speech that still stings conservatives.
“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 would be censored at the whim of government,” Kennedy inveighed from the Senate floor, “and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.”
Soon after the Bork nomination hearings started, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran an opinion piece that read, “Let’s just hope something enduring results from the hearings for the justice-to-be, like a new verb: ‘Borked.’ Dictionaries will say that it’s synonymous with “maligned.” Part of that statement was precient: borked did enter the lexicon. William Safire has a concise definition of what the word means to conservatives. To bork is to “viciously attack a presidential nominee, blackening his name in an all-out effort to defeat his confirmation by the senate,” he wrote in an update to his Political Dictionary, adding that Bork was defeated after “an extensive media campaign by his opponents.”
Safire was touching on Republican anger over an anti-Bork ad narrated by Gregory Peck. The ad, produced by the liberal group People for the American Way, leveled some powerful accusations against Bork, chiefly that “he has a strange idea of what justice is.” A long list of accusations followed: that Bork defended poll taxes and literacy tests at the ballot box, that he opposed the law requiring businesses to serve everyone equally (like at lunch counters), he didn’t see a right to privacy in the constitution and that the first amendment only applied to political speech.
The ad was pretty accurate. Bork, who was notoriously outspoken, left a paper trail of unfortunate opinions behind him. He opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for instance, an opinion that had not aged well by 1987. He defended the poll tax, which had been used in the South to hinder African Americans from voting during the Jim Crow era, saying “It was a very small tax, it was not discriminatory, and I doubt that it had much impact on the welfare of the nation one way or the other.” He argued that Roe v. Wade had no basis in law and that the 14th amendment could not be used to protect women’s reproductive rights.
On paper, Bork was more than qualified for the bench. He was a professor at a prestigious school of law and well respected in his profession, but Democrats had real reason for seeing Bork as outside of the pale. Conservatives argued that Bork was judged for his orientation as a constitutional originalist rather than his qualifications, which they saw as deeply unfair. They exacted revenge by using borked as a verb whenever Democrats objected to Republican nominees, dismissing any concerns as ideologically motivated.
It’s now mainstream to see the Bork confirmation hearings as the moment when hyperpartisanship began. Any vaguely contentious confirmation hearing now invites a reference to Borking. From this perspective, Democrats are to blame for the lack of civility. They started the fight, and there is a clear throughline from Bork’s hearings to the torpedoing of Democratic nominees like Garland Merrick. Even Mother Jones gives this theory the nod. “This trauma runs very deep,” Kevin Drum wrote in 2016, “and Democrats simply don’t have anything like it in their recent history.”
But the Bork controversy should have surprised no one. “The politicization of the confirmation process by Bork opponents was spurred by the highly political nature of the nomination itself,” The New York Times reported in 1987. Another Times article from the same year made a similar point. “The Reagan Administration,” it read, “has made a more determined effort than any in recent history to appoint judges who share the President’s conservative political views.” More than 90 percent of the time, one study found, Bork cast a vote aligned with conservative values, defined as votes against civil rights plaintiffs, criminal defendants and liberal public interest groups and in favor of business interests. The confirmation hearings were ideological, in other words, because the President was looking to appoint an ideologue.
A martyr to the Right, Bork symbolized to the Left a moral victory. Thirty years later, bork remains a term used freely by conservatives and almost always used as a pejorative. A search for “borked” on Brietbart, for instance, turns up hundreds of results; on ThinkProgress, it turns up zilch.
So, depending on your filter bubble, expect to hear the word a lot more…or not at all.
