On July 1, 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Judge Robert Bork for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, to succeed Lewis F. Powell Jr., who had earlier announced his retirement.

At the time of his nomination, Bork was a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a position to which he had been appointed by President Reagan in 1982.

Opposition to his nomination centered on his perceived willingness to roll back the civil rights rulings of the Warren and Burger courts, and his role in the Saturday Night Massacre during the Watergate scandal.

[2] United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., was considered a conservative/moderate, but referred to as the "swing vote" in close decisions at the time.

After he announced his retirement on June 26, 1987,[3] Senate Democrats asked liberal leaders to form a "solid phalanx" to oppose an "ideological extremist" replacement for Powell.

[9] 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, and schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would 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.

"[11] In 1988, an analysis published in the Western Political Quarterly of amicus curiae briefs filed by U.S. Solicitors General during the Warren and Burger Courts found that during Bork's tenure in the position during the Nixon and Ford Administrations (1973–1977), Bork took liberal positions in the aggregate as often as Thurgood Marshall did during the Johnson Administration (1965–1967), and more often than Wade H. McCree did during the Carter Administration (1977–1981), in part because Bork filed briefs in favor of the litigants in civil rights cases 75 percent of the time (contradicting a previous review of his civil rights record published in 1983).

[12][13] 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.

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".

During debate over his nomination, a list of videotapes Bork had rented was leaked to the press, which led to the enactment of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act as a response.

These groups also claimed that Bork's marriage to Mary Ellen Pohl, a former Roman Catholic nun and anti-abortion supporter would allow her to influence his decisions on the abortion issue.

Accordingly, a large number of left-wing groups mobilized to press for Bork's rejection, and his confirmation hearings became an intensely partisan battle.

[27][28] Following the decisive vote, Bork's political support in the Senate quickly eroded, making the nomination's ultimate defeat all but certain, and it was widely expected that he would withdraw his name from further consideration.

[30][31] The following month, President Reagan nominated Judge Anthony Kennedy for the position on the Court (after the name of a second nominee, Douglas H. Ginsburg, was withdrawn).

In 2011, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera claimed that "[t]he Bork fight, in some ways, was the beginning of the end of civil discourse in politics.

Nocera cited Democratic activist Ann Lewis, who wrote that if Bork's nomination "were carried out as an internal Senate debate, we would have deep and thoughtful discussions about the Constitution, and then we would lose.