The New Criterion
(Mobile Version)

Features

March 2001

Sanctimony serving politics: the Florida fiasco

by Robert Bork

Agreat deal more than the name of the new president was at stake in Bush v. Gore. As columnist Tony Blankley wrote in The Washington Times on November 11,

 
[W]hat is sticking in the craw this time is the brazen, slick, daylight heisting of the votes. ...In this regard, Mr. Gore has learned from Mr. Clinton that when he violates the nation’s values in front of the public—staring us down, daring us to do something about it—our failure to defend ourselves morally weakens us for the next time. And there will always be a next time.

In that sense, the Supreme Court, at considerable cost to itself, saved us, at least momentarily, from a further precipitous decline in our public morality.

Few events illustrate so starkly the debased state of America’s political and legal culture as did Vice President Gore’s frenzied attempts to overturn Governor Bush’s narrow v ...

This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchase

Log in

Robert Bork is

Robert H
more from this author


This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 19 March 2001, on page 4
Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com


E-mail to friend(s)