Robert Bork Quotes
The purpose that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality before the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the law.
Bork, Robert H. The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law. Free Press, 1990, p. 82.
This ruling upheld a military draft for males only. The logic was that men and women were dissimilar persons.
The large majority of the American people opposed legal segregation and for years, the segregationist, racist, Southern white minority were able to prevent any Civil Rights legislation by using the filibuster until President Lyndon Johnson, formerly a Southern Senator who understood the legislative process better than any other American president used his great skill to pass Civil Rights legislation instead of opposing it which he had done for years as a Texas Senator and the Majority Leader of the Senate.
This was the first named Civil Rights Act passed in the United States. It was passed over the veto of President Andrew Johnson, a Southerner, who tried to thwart Congress’s efforts at Reconstruction.
It is surprising that these ideas would come from one of the most autocratic powerful monarch in the world at the time. However there were many very liberal influences on her from Europe. This set of proposals she even sent to Voltaire to get his feedback and criticism.
Quoted in the Court’s notes of the meeting
These elements later were used in the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
This statement in the President’s Second Inaugural. Infuriated the politicians of the Southern States. Remember, at the time there was brutal discrimination throughout most of the South, and more important to the South than the fact if the discrimination was their perverse view that this was a right, proper and necessary state of affairs for the welfare of the people and was required by Christianity’s mandates as they read the Scripture. For the President to state so publicly that discrimination was contrary to the law, justice, good faith, citizenship and fairness was a major shock. Since the early days of reconstruction after the Civil war in the Grant Administration, no president had spoken so publicly and openly against the Southern status quo.
Southerners and some others wanted to discriminate and fought civil rights legislation. The excuse they gave for opposition was that the Federal Government was usurping the power of the states to determine what civil rights people of the state would have. Shellabarger made it clear that the civil rights bill would not require ANY rights to be given. It just required that if the states granted rights, they could not discriminate by race as to those rights. But the states were free to decide which rights all citizens of the state would have. See {623473} .
Plessy v. Ferguson was one of the worst Supreme Court Decisions in American history. It held that states could provide and/or mandate racially segregated facilities and institutions so long as they were equal.
Robert Heron Bork was an American judge, government official, and legal scholar who served as the Solicitor General of the United States from 1973 to 1977. A professor at Yale Law School by occupation, he later served as a judge on the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1982 to 1988. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the U.S. Senate rejected his nomination.
