Robert Bork obit

Robert Bork dies at 85

He was not on the list.

Robert Bork, whose failed nomination to the Supreme Court sparked one of the most contentious appointment battles in American history and helped inspire the conservative legal movement, died Wednesday. He was 85.

Bork’s son, Robert H. Bork, Jr., told the AP his father died at the Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington of complications from heart ailments.

Bork had served as acting Attorney General and as Solicitor General under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan appointed him to D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. But Bork only became a household name in 1987, when Reagan tried to promote him to the Supreme Court.

Bork’s nomination was fiercely opposed by Democrats, who saw him as a reactionary who would threaten racial progress and eliminate the line between church and state. Defenders pointed out not a single one of Bork’s earlier rulings had been overturned by the court.

Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) delivered a famous speech on the floor of the Senate, where he portrayed “Robert Bork’s America” as place where there “was no room at the inn for Blacks, and no place in the Constitution for women.” In October 1987, the Senate rejected Bork’s nomination, with 58 Senators voting against. Bork would resign from his judgeship the next year. Justice Anthony Kennedy — today considered the key swing vote on the court — eventual filled the vacancy.

“We would have had a jurisprudence over the past 25 years that would have been much closer to the founders’ intent,” had Bork reached the high court, Edwin Meese III, who was Attorney General under Ronald Reagan, told POLITICO. “This is not to disparage anybody, but the force of his intellect and his scholarship would have had a tremendous impact on the court.”

For example, Meese predicted Obamacare almost certainly would have been overturned in July if Bork was on the bench.

Meese said he counted Bork as a mentor, and that the judge “was one of the country’s greatest legal minds and a great champion of the Constitution.”

The fierce nature of the fight over Bork’s nomination gave rise to the term “Borking,” meaning to vilify a person to prevent his rise to public office, and has become an increasingly common occurrence in Washington since his nomination.

“My name became a verb,” Bork told CNN years after the nomination, “and I regard that as one form of immortality.”

Bork became even more influential in conservative circles after his nomination was defeated, serving as a rallying cry and icon. He worked at two conservative think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute and the Hudson Institute. In 2012, he served as an adviser to GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign on legal issues. (Vice President Joe Biden, who helped defeat Bork’s nomination, attacked Romney for associating with Bork.) In a 1996 book, “Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline,” he attacked moral relativism and blamed social liberals for the nation’s ills.

“Robert Bork was one of the most influential legal scholars of the past 50 years,” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said in a statement. “His impact on legal thinking in the fields of Antitrust and Constitutional Law was profound and lasting. More important for the final accounting, he was a good man and a loyal citizen. May he rest in peace.”

Two senators agreed with the Justice’s assessment.