Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim in CT
No, he was not confirmed because of partisan politics. A new phrase came out of that, called getting “borked”, it means to be denied something that you are obviously qualified for.
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I don't know where you found that definition, it's closer to the last one of these. And that's also why his confirmation was opposed.
According to columnist William Safire, the first published use of bork as a verb was possibly in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution of August 20, 1987. Safire defines to bork by reference "to the way Democrats savaged Ronald Reagan's nominee, the Appeals Court judge Robert H. Bork, the year before."[37] Perhaps the best known use of the verb to bork occurred in July 1991 at a conference of the National Organization for Women in New York City. Feminist Florynce Kennedy addressed the conference on the importance of defeating the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, saying, "We're going to bork him. We're going to kill him politically ... This little creep, where did he come from?"[38] Thomas was subsequently confirmed after one of the most divisive confirmation hearings in Supreme Court history.
In March 2002, the Oxford English Dictionary added an entry for the verb bork as U.S. political slang, with this definition: "To defame or vilify (a person) systematically, esp. in the mass media, usually with the aim of preventing his or her appointment to public office; to obstruct or thwart (a person) in this way."[39]
There was an earlier usage of bork as a passive verb, common among litigators in the D.C. Circuit: to "get borked" was to receive a conservative judicial decision with no justification in the law, reflecting their perception, later documented in the Cardozo Law Review, of Bork's tendency to decide cases solely according to his ideology.[40]