Ronald Reagan Supreme Court candidates
[3] That opportunity came in his first year in office when he nominated Sandra Day O'Connor to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Potter Stewart.
[6] Rehnquist's confirmation was largely split along party lines, showing that he had not improved his standing among Senate Democrats since his contentious 1971 nomination to the Court.
[8] Supreme Court of the United States Associate Justice Lewis Franklin Powell Jr. was a moderate/conservative but the "swing vote" on close decisions, and even before his expected retirement on June 27, 1987, Senate Democrats had asked liberal leaders to form "a solid phalanx" to oppose whomever President Ronald Reagan nominated to replace him, assuming the appointment would send the court rightward; Democrats warned Reagan there would be a fight.
[11] Reagan considered appointing Utah Senator Orrin Hatch to the seat, but Congress had approved $6,000 pay raises for Supreme Court Justices in February, raising a problem under the Ineligibility Clause of the United States Constitution, which prohibits a member of Congress from accepting an appointment for which the pay had been increased during that member's term.
A memorandum by Assistant Attorney General Charles J. Cooper rejected the notion that a Saxbe fix—a rollback of the salary for the position—could satisfy the Ineligibility Clause.
Within 45 minutes of Bork's nomination to the Court, 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 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.
Bork later said in his best-selling[17] 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".
His video rental history was unremarkable, and included such harmless titles as A Day at the Races, Ruthless People and The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Accordingly, a large number of liberal advocacy groups mobilized to press for Bork's rejection, and the resulting 1987 Senate confirmation hearings became an intensely partisan battle.
[23] At the close, Biden won praise for conducting the proceedings fairly and with good humor and courage, as his 1988 presidential campaign collapsed in the middle of the hearings.
[23][24] Biden framed his discussion around the belief that the U.S. Constitution provides rights to liberty and privacy that extend beyond those explicitly enumerated in the text, and that Bork's strong originalism was ideologically incompatible with that view.
