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Justice Gets an Orderly Borking
This retired judge just got out of the hospital and is in no condition to do a lick of research and therefore should not be practicing punditry.
I have in past writings made my admiration for Ruth Bader Ginsburg abundantly clear and the same could be said about my contempt for Moscow Mitch McConnell. Every excuse to keep my mouth shut beckons me to preserve what reputation I have in case I do not recover.
Instead, I shall eliminate one possible epitaph: “Here lies retired Judge Steve Russell, perished from an overdose of common sense.”
I am of the generation that added to the English language the verb, “to Bork.” It’s a measure of how quickly we move along in the world and how we describe it that I consider it necessary to briefly explain how an obscure legal scholar named Robert Bork got to be a cause when President Ronald Reagan nominated him in 1987 to vacant seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
There is an industrial strength socialization process that usually grinds the rough edges off judges before they have a chance to do much damage, a process that works on dinky little state court judges educated in public law schools like yours truly as well as federal judges born with enough money for private law schools and…
