Bork Wants Weaker Courts, Censorship To Halt Moral Rot Rejected Justice Says Courts Threaten Our Liberty

Former federal judge Robert H. Bork says America is in decline and “the rot is spreading.” As cures, he proposes censorship of “the vilest aspects of our popular culture” and allowing Congress to overrule the Supreme Court.

“It is the courts that threaten our liberty - the liberty to govern ourselves - more profoundly than does any legislature,” Bork says in a new book.

He calls for a constitutional amendment allowing the House and Senate to overturn high court decisions by majority vote in each house.

That would represent a sharp departure from the current constitutional balance that gives each of three branches of government - the courts, Congress and the presidency - equal power.

Without naming them, Bork said some justices appointed by Presidents Reagan and Bush have disappointed him.

“Having no firm judicial philosophy,” he said, they “migrate to the left.”

Bork, whose own nomination to the Supreme Court by Reagan in 1987 was rejected by the Senate, 58-42, spells out his views in “Slouching Towards Gomorrah.” In the book, he says decadence permeates most of American culture - its “popular entertainment, art, religion, education, scholarship, economic activity, science, technology, law and morality.”

Of those, only science, technology and the economy are healthy, Bork says, “and it seems highly unlikely that a vigorous economy can be sustained in an enfeebled, hedonistic culture, particularly when that culture distorts incentives by increasingly rejecting personal achievement as the criterion for the distribution of rewards.”

Bork is now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank.

His book is a tart critique of American society. His villain is “modern liberalism,” which he said Bill Clinton, a child of the 1960s, exemplifies.