A Simple Alan Simpson Question Took Unexpected Turn

The death of former GOP Sen. Alan Simpson last week got veteran Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse thinking about a simple question he once asked of court nominee Robert Bork, and how Bork's answer helped doom his cause. It came during Bork's 1987 confirmation hearing, which wasn't going well. Wyoming's Simpson, trying to help the Reagan nominee, quoted some lines from the Rudyard Kipling poem "If," and then lobbed "the softest of softball questions" to the nominee, writes Greenhouse for the New York Times:

• Simpson: "And I have one final question," he said to Bork. "Why do you want to be an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court?"
• Bork: "I think it would be an intellectual feast just to be there," answered Bork, after talking about how much he loved the courtroom.

The self-centered answer didn't land well. "I don't maintain that the answer to Senator Simpson's question is what doomed the Bork nomination, which went down to defeat at the hands of a bipartisan majority of 58 senators," writes Greenhouse. "But it certainly didn't help. The vision of a Justice Bork enjoying an intellectual feast" as the court dealt with weighty issues such as abortion and civil rights "hung over the nomination until its bitter end more than a month later, and long after." (Read the full essay.)