SOS Deep Dive: The Anatomy of Borking

A comprehensive look at the 40-year escalation of Supreme Court confirmation battles. We trace the origins of "Borking" from the Robert Bork hearings of 1987 to the modern-day targeting of justices like Brett Kavanaugh. By removing the partisan spin and cable-news noise, we examine the organized ideological warfare, the shifting standards of confirmation, and how political theater ultimately transformed into direct, physical threats against the nation's highest court.

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Every day, stripped-out news gives you the facts in just a few minutes. But some stories are complex. They need room to breathe to get the full picture. Start to finish. This is SOS Deep Dive. A longer look at the stories that matter. The house it stops in front of belongs to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. His wife and two young daughters are asleep inside. A 26-year-old passenger steps out, dressed in dark clothing and carrying a heavy black suitcase. Inside the bag is a Glock 17 pistol, ammunition, extra magazines, a tactical chest rig, a tactical knife, pepper spray, zip ties, a hammer, a crowbar, and a set of lockpick tools. The passenger has traveled over 2,000 miles from Simi Valley, California with a confessed plan to break into the justice's home, assassinate him, and then turn the weapon on himself. Standing on the sidewalk, he spots two United States Marshals stationed outside the residence. He pauses. He walks slowly down the block, pulls out his phone, and calls his sister. She talks him down. Minutes later, he dials 911 and surrenders. His name is Nicholas John Rosk. He will eventually plead guilty to attempting to murder a Supreme Court justice and be sentenced to 26 years in federal prison. Thirty-five years after the confirmation battle of Robert Bork, the political war over the Supreme Court has escalated from a battle of words and advertisements into a direct physical threat against the justices and their families. This is that story, start to finish. Welcome to SOS Deep Dive. In this special feature-length episode, we are stripping out the political theater, the partisan spin, and the cable news noise to examine the documented history of a term that has defined American politics for nearly 40 years: Borking. We are going to trace the full arc, how the battle for the nation's highest court transformed from a debate over legal qualifications into an organized industry of ideological warfare, personal exposure, and character attacks. We will follow this through four decades, across six nominations, and through a chain of escalation that leads from the floor of the United States Senate to the front doors of the justices themselves. This is part one, the Genesis of Borking. The year is 1987. The Supreme Court is balanced on a knife's edge, and the retirement of Associate Justice Lewis Powell Jr. creates an opening that has the potential to shift the ideological direction of the court for a generation. On July 1st, President Ronald Reagan announces his nominee, Judge Robert Bork of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. On paper, Bork is one of the most qualified nominees in decades. He is a former Solicitor General of the United States. He is one of the foremost legal scholars of the 20th century. He is the intellectual godfather of originalism, the judicial philosophy that holds that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its original public meaning at the time it was written and ratified. His supporters see a once-in-a-generation legal mind. His opponents see a once-in-a-generation threat. Within 45 minutes of Reagan's announcement, before the nominee has given a single interview or answered a single question, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts stands on the floor of the United States Senate and delivers a nationally broadcast speech that bypasses every tradition of senatorial courtesy. Kennedy does not begin with Bork's judicial record, he begins with Watergate. Fourteen years earlier, on October 20, 1973, the country had watched what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. President Richard Nixon, desperate to stop the Watergate investigation, ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was subpoenaing the White House tapes. Richardson refused the order and resigned. Nixon then turned to Deputy Attorney General William Ruckhauser. Ruckhauser also refused. He too resigned. Nixon then turned to the third ranking official in the Department of Justice, Solicitor General Robert Bork. Bork carried out the order. He fired Cox and temporarily abolished the office of the special prosecutor. At the time, Bork explained his decision as a matter of constitutional duty. He believed the president possessed the legal authority to dismiss executive branch employees, and he believed that if he too resigned, the leadership of the entire Justice Department would collapse. Attorney General Richardson himself later stated that he had encouraged Bork to stay and carry out the order, rather than leave the department without anyone in charge. But on that July afternoon in 1987, Ted Kennedy does not present this nuance. He frames it as a disqualification. In the Watergate scandal of 1973, two distinguished Republicans, Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Rucklschaus, put integrity and the Constitution ahead of loyalty to a corrupt president. The deed devolved on Solicitor General Robert Bork, who executed the unconscionable assignment that has become one of the darkest chapters for the rule of law in American history. That act, later ruled illegal by a federal court, is sufficient by itself to disqualify Mr. Bork. Then Kennedy pivots to Bork's judicial philosophy and delivers the most consequential paragraph in the modern history of Supreme Court politics. Quote, Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens. That midnight raids line is a direct rhetorical translation of a highly technical legal debate. Twenty-two years earlier, in the 1965 landmark case Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court had struck down a state law that criminalized the use of contraceptives by married couples. Writing for the 7-2 majority, Justice William O. Douglas acknowledged that the Constitution does not explicitly mention a right to privacy. Instead, Douglass famously wrote that the specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have, quote, penumbras formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance, end quote, creating a constitutionally protected zone of marital privacy. Robert Bork had written extensive academic critiques of this ruling. As an originalist, he argued that Douglass's penumbras and emanations metaphor was poetic reasoning rather than rigorous constitutional interpretation. He believed that while contraception bans were foolish policy, the Constitution did not contain a general freestanding right to privacy, and that such moral regulations should be decided by elected legislatures, not invented by federal judges. Bork never advocated for bedroom raids. He never advocated for banning contraception. His argument was about which branch of government gets to make those decisions. But Kennedy's campaign takes this sophisticated scholarly disagreement about constitutional methodology and translates it into vivid, terrifying imagery: midnight raids, segregated lunch counters, back alley abortions. It is devastating and it is unprecedented. Over the summer of 1987, progressive advocacy groups, led by people for the American Way, launch a coordinated multi-million dollar public relations campaign. They spend an estimated $12 million on nationwide print and television advertisements, making it the most expensive judicial confirmation fight in American history at that time. The most prominent television commercial is narrated by the acclaimed actor Gregory Peck. Speaking directly to the camera in the same measured baritone that audiences remember from To Kill a Mockingbird, Peck warns viewers that Bork has a quote, strange idea of what justice is, end quote, and charges that he had defended poll taxes and opposed civil rights laws. The Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by then Senator Joe Biden, convenes a 12-day hearing in mid-September. Bork testifies extensively. Unlike every nominee who will follow him, Bork engages openly with every philosophical question, defending his record and his originalist beliefs in long scholarly exchanges. He treats the hearing like a constitutional seminar. His opponents treat it like a political campaign. The mismatch is fatal. In a highly unusual breach of personal boundaries, a reporter for the Washington City Paper obtains and publishes Bork's video rental history, running through his recent selections, in an attempt to probe his views on privacy. The episode is so invasive that Congress will later pass the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988, making it a federal crime to disclose someone's video rental records without their consent. The law is still in effect today. By early October, Bork's political support is eroding. The Judiciary Committee votes 9 to 5 against recommending him to the full Senate. Standard political wisdom dictates that Bork should withdraw his name to spare the administration further damage. But on October 9th, Robert Bork refuses. Standing before reporters, he insists on a full Senate floor debate and vote. He argues that withdrawing would validate, quote, tamtains of distortion, end quote, and would establish a dangerous precedent, sending a signal to every future nominee that organized political pressure can veto a qualified judge before they ever take the bench. On October 23, 1987, the full Senate holds the final vote. By a margin of 42 in favor to 58 against, Robert Bork is rejected. It is the largest margin of defeat for a Supreme Court nominee in American history. 40 Republicans and just two Democrats vote in favor. 52 Democrats and six Republicans vote against. Within weeks, a new term enters the American political vocabulary. The word is Bork. It is defined by journalists and commentators as the systematic vilification and obstruction of a qualified nominee through coordinated media, ideological, and personal attacks. Robert Bork returns to private life. He writes a best-selling book and becomes one of the most influential conservative legal thinkers of the 20th century. But the process that bears his name is just getting started. Four years later, the lesson of Robert Bork is put to the test under dramatically different circumstances. On June 27, 1991, Justice Durgood Marshall, the legendary civil rights attorney who argued Brown versus Board of Education and became the first African American to sit on the Supreme Court, announces his retirement due to failing health. On July 1st, President George H. W. Bush nominates Clarence Thomas to replace him. Thomas's journey to the nomination is one of the most extraordinary personal histories in modern American public life. He was born in 1948 in Pinpoint, Georgia, a tiny, isolated community south of Savannah that had been founded by freed slaves. His family grew up in grinding poverty, speaking Gullah, a Creole language blending English and West African elements as their first language. When Thomas was two years old, his father abandoned the family. When he was seven, after a house fire destroyed their home, his mother sent Clarence and his younger brother to live in Savannah with their maternal grandfather, Myers Anderson. Anderson was a self-made fuel oil delivery man with a third-grade education and a will of iron. He instilled in his grandsons a rigid discipline built on self-reliance, hard work, and personal responsibility. He had a saying that Thomas would quote for the rest of his life: Old Man Kant is dead, I helped bury him. Thomas attended segregated Catholic schools in Savannah, eventually graduating from the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts and entering Yale Law School in 1971. He was admitted under Yale's affirmative action program. But Thomas would later write that the program left him with a permanent sense of stigma, a feeling that classmates, professors, and future employers would always wonder whether his credentials were truly earned or simply given. As a young man, he had identified as a black radical. Over time, influenced by the work of conservative economists like Thomas Sowell, he broke from liberal orthodoxy entirely. He came to believe that welfare programs and affirmative action were not liberating black Americans, but trapping them in cycles of dependency and diminished expectations. By the 1980s, Clarence Thomas had become one of the most prominent black conservative voices in Washington. Reagan appointed him to run the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC, and now Bush was nominating him to the highest court in the land, to fill the seat once held by the most iconic civil rights lawyer in history. For progressive organizations, the stakes are existential. If confirmed, Thomas will cement a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and because he is a black conservative replacing a black liberal icon, the opposition cannot simply deploy the standard ideological arguments without confronting questions about race. The opposition campaign mobilizes immediately. The NAACP votes 49 to 1 to oppose Thomas. At a National Organization for Women conference in July, activist attorney Florence Kennedy signals the group's strategy explicitly. Her words, reported in the press at the time, are blunt. Quote, we're going to Bork him, end quote. The initial confirmation hearings begin on September 10th, under the chairmanship of Senator Joe Biden. The questioning focuses on Thomas's views on natural law, affirmative action, and the right to privacy. But Thomas has studied the tape of what happened to Bork. He has learned the lesson. Where Bork was expansive, scholarly, and open, Thomas is cautious, controlled, and deliberately vague. He declines to engage in extended philosophical debates. He avoids committing to positions that could be weaponized in advertising campaigns. The committee splits seven to seven, sending the nomination to the full Senate without a recommendation. A final vote is scheduled for early October. Thomas appears to have the votes necessary for confirmation. Then a confidential document detonates the entire process. In late September, Senate Democratic staffers had contacted Anita Hill, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma. Hill had worked as a personal assistant to Clarence Thomas a decade earlier, first at the Department of Education in 1981, and then following him to the EEOC, where she served from 1982 to 1983. Hill provided the staffers with a confidential statement detailing allegations of workplace sexual harassment. She emphasized that she wanted her identity and her statement kept strictly confidential. She did not want to go public. But on Sunday, October 6, 1991, just 48 hours before the scheduled full Senate floor vote, that confidentiality is destroyed. Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio obtains a copy of the confidential FBI affidavit and broadcasts the story to the nation. Major newspapers follow within hours. The identity of the staffer who leaked the document is never discovered, despite a subsequent Senate investigation. But the leak achieves its immediate political objective. The Senate postpones the scheduled vote, and the Judiciary Committee is forced to reopen the hearings for nationally televised testimony. On Friday, October 11, 1991, the televised earrings resume in the same Senate caucus room where the Watergate hearings had been held 18 years earlier. An estimated 30 million Americans are watching live. Anita Hill takes the stand first. In calm, precise, detailed testimony, she alleges that Thomas repeatedly pressured her for social dates despite her rejections, and that he frequently initiated highly inappropriate conversations in the workplace. She describes scenes from pornographic films that Thomas allegedly discussed in the office. She recounts graphic comments about his own physical anatomy, and she describes one specific incident in which Thomas looked at a can of Coca-Cola on his desk and asked, Who has put pubic hair on my Coke? End quote. The room is silent. The senators, all 14 of them white men, sit in a long, elevated row above her. That evening, Clarence Thomas returns to the hearing room. He categorically denies every allegation. He states flatly that he had never engaged in any sexual conversation with Anita Hill, at any time, in any place. And then he delivers the most famous statement of the entire confirmation era. This is a circus, it's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree. End quote. The hearing room erupts. Over the weekend, the proceedings become a national referendum. Senators conduct aggressive, combative questioning of both Hill and Thomas. The Committee of 14 men struggles visibly with the gender dynamics of the moment. Republican Senator Arlen Spector of Pennsylvania, a former prosecutor, conducts the most contentious cross-examination. He presses Hill on minor differences between her public testimony and her private FBI statement. He challenges her credibility on the grounds that she followed Thomas from the Department of Education to the EEOC, asking why she would voluntarily follow an alleged harasser to a second job. Hill responds that she feared losing her career in Washington, that Thomas was a powerful figure in the Reagan administration, and that she believed the move was necessary for her professional future. She explains that the harassment occurred in episodes, not constantly, and that she hoped the behavior would stop. Republican Senator Orin Hatch of Utah takes an even more dramatic approach. On live television, he reads passages from the horror novel The Exorcist, pointing out similarities to some of Hill's graphic descriptions. He suggests that her allegations were fabricated and lifted from popular fiction. Democratic senators, for their part, largely avoid mounting an aggressive defense of Hill. Instead, they ask repetitive, graphic questions about the alleged conversations, forcing Hill to repeat the explicit details again and again on national television. It is a strategy that many feminist commentators at the time describe as re-traumatizing. Several of Hill's female friends testify that she had confided in them about Thomas's uncomfortable behavior in the early 1980s, contemporaneous to the alleged events. A second accuser, former EEOC employee Angela Wright, is subpoenaed and travels to Washington to testify. In a sworn statement, Wright alleges that Thomas had repeatedly pressured her for dates, made inappropriate comments about her physical appearance, and made remarks about women that made her uncomfortable. But in a crucial decision that will be debated for decades, Chairman Joe Biden and the Democratic leadership choose not to call Wright to testify publicly. Fearing that she will face aggressive cross-examination that could undermine the opposition's credibility, they enter her written statement into the record and move on. Late on Sunday night, October 13th, the committee calls John Doggett III, an attorney who knew Hill. In a dramatic late-night session, Doggett testifies that Hill had a pattern of, in his characterization, reacting poorly to romantic rejection and suggests that her allegations were rooted in personal grievance rather than fact. Despite the intense media saturation, contemporary public opinion comes down on the nominee's side. Gallup polling, conducted immediately after the testimonies, reports that 55% of the American public believes Clarence Thomas, while 27% believes Anita Hill. Among black Americans, the numbers are even more lopsided. 69% support Thomas's confirmation. On October 15, 1991, the full Senate holds its final vote. By a Margin of 52 to 48, Clarence Thomas is confirmed as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. It is the narrowest margin of confirmation for a Supreme Court justice in over a century. The personal battle is over, but the tactic has been tested. The blueprint of weaponizing 11th-hour personal allegations, confidential leaks, and nationally televised spectacle has been proven. It did not stop Thomas, but it nearly did. Fourteen years pass, the battleground shifts again, and this time the opposition does not have a personal accusation to deploy, so it invents one. On October 31, 2005, President George W. Bush nominates Judge Samuel Alito Jr. to succeed the retiring Sandra Day O'Connor. Alito has served 15 years as a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, building a record of careful, methodical jurisprudence. He is widely regarded, even among liberal legal commentators, as qualified. But the political math is clear. O'Connor has been the court's swing vote on abortion, affirmative action, and church-state issues. Her replacement will determine the direction of the court for decades. The fight will not be about qualifications, it will be about outcome. Progressive advocacy groups mobilize, but without a Watergate firing or a harassment allegation, they turned to a single line on a job application Samuel Alito had filled out 21 years earlier. In 1985, while applying for a promotion within the Reagan Justice Department, Alito had listed his membership in a group called the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, or CAP. CAP had been founded in 1972, the year Alito graduated from Princeton. The group was organized by conservative alumni who opposed the university's transition to coeducation, which had begun in 1969, and who criticized affirmative action policies in admissions. Over the years, its publication, a magazine called Prospect, had run articles that were sharply critical of minority admissions and women's inclusion at the university. During the January 2006 confirmation hearings, Senate Democrats, led by Senator Ted Kennedy, seize on this membership. They question Alito aggressively about CAP, attempting to link him personally to the most inflammatory articles published in the magazine. The clear implication: Alito is a bigot who opposes the admission of women and minorities to elite universities. Alito testifies that he has no recollection of active involvement in the group, did not write for or subscribe to the views expressed in its magazine, and had likely listed the membership on his government job application as a way to demonstrate his conservative bona fides for a Reagan administration position. He cannot explain the listing further because it was two decades old and he simply does not remember. Senator Kennedy demands that the committee subpoena the full archives of CAP, which are held in the Library of Congress. A search is conducted. The records are reviewed. Samuel Alito's name does not appear in any membership lists, meeting minutes, editorial board records, or publications. There is no evidence of active participation. The one-line listing on a 21-year-old job application is all there is. But by then, the damage has been done. The implication has been planted. The hearings have become an extended exercise in guilt by association. On January 11, 2006, the emotional weight of the process reaches its breaking point. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina takes the microphone. In a moment that is part defense of the nominee and part cross-examination of the committee itself, Graham turns to Alito and asks a series of blunt questions. Are you a bigot? Have you ever discriminated against anyone on the basis of race? Have you ever excluded anyone from your courtroom because of their religion, their gender, or the color of their skin? Alito answers no to each question. Seated directly behind her husband, Martha Ann Alito has spent days listening to senators imply that her husband is a closet racist. She has listened to news coverage that frames a single line on a decade's old application as evidence of deep-seated prejudice. On this day, suffering from a severe migraine headache, she quietly stands up from her chair and leaves the hearing room in tears. The image of the nominee's wife weeping is broadcast on every network. It becomes one of the most replayed moments of the entire hearing. For supporters, it is evidence of the cruelty of the process. For opponents, it is a distraction from legitimate questions about judicial ideology. Either way, it crystallizes the human toll. Following a 10-8 party line vote in the Judiciary Committee, a last-ditch filibuster attempt is launched. Senator John Kerry, calling in from a conference in Davos, Switzerland, urges his colleagues to block the vote. He is joined by freshman Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. But the filibuster effort fails. On January 30, 2006, the Senate votes 72 to 25 to end debate, far exceeding the 60-vote threshold needed to break a filibuster. The next day, Samuel Alito is confirmed by a vote of 58 to 42. By the end of the Alito confirmation, the transformation of the Supreme Court nomination process is complete. Consider the trajectory. In 1962, Byron White was confirmed 89 to nothing. In 1986, Antonin Scalia was confirmed 98 to 0. Just one year later, Robert Bork was rejected 42 to 58. By 2006, a 58 to 42 confirmation is considered a comfortable margin. The battles over Bork, Thomas, and Alito have established three structural changes that will define every nomination fight to come. First, the Ginsburg precedent. After watching Borg destroy himself by engaging honestly with every philosophical question, future nominees learn a simple, devastating lesson: say nothing of substance. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg is nominated in 1993, she declines to answer questions about specific legal issues, saying it would be improper to preview her positions on cases that might come before the court. The Senate accepts this and confirms her 96 to 3. Every nominee since, left and right, has followed her playbook. The confirmation hearing, designed by the founders as a genuine examination of a nominee's judicial philosophy, has become a choreographed performance, in which the nominee says as little as possible, and the senators perform for cameras. Second, the rise of dark money, the $12 million spent to defeat Robert Bork in 1987, was considered staggering at the time. It established a model. Nonprofit, tax-exempt organizations that do not have to disclose their donors, begin raising tens of millions of dollars to run targeted advertising campaigns around every nomination. On the progressive side, networks linked to Arabella advisors, including the 1630 Fund and its judicial arm, Demand Justice, build professional operations dedicated to opposing conservative nominees. On the conservative side, the Judicial Crisis Network and the Concord Fund raise equal sums from anonymous donors to run supportive counter-campaigns. The confirmation process becomes a permanent, well-funded industry that exists between nominations, waiting for the next fight. Third, the complete polarization of the vote. Supreme Court confirmations are no longer about legal competence, they are about partisan alignment. The era of bipartisan consensus, when a Republican president's nominee could receive 60 or 70 Democratic votes on the strength of their qualifications alone, is over. Future votes will split almost perfectly along party lines. These three changes, the silence of nominees, the flood of anonymous money, and the partisanship of the vote, are the foundation on which the next era will be built. The tools of character assassination, personal exposure, confidential leaks, and media warfare have been forged and refined across three decades. What comes next will make all of it look restrained. We will be right back with part two, the weaponization era. Hey SOS fans, this is Jesse Spano. If you're enjoying this deep dive, you need to check out the Stripped Out News Daily Podcast. Every single morning, we cut through the partisan spin and give you the bare facts of the most important stories happening around the world. All in just a few minutes. No screaming talking heads, no hidden agendas, just the news. You can listen on your favorite podcast app or head over to stripptoutnews.com to read the stories and see the data for yourself. That's stripptoutnews.com. Also, if you're in a hurry but still want to get a little reading in, try the five-minute summary on the site. People are raving. Back to SOS. Welcome back to SOS Deep Dive. This is part two, the weaponization era. The year is 2018. The retirement of Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, who for decades served as the court's unpredictable swing vote, creates an opening that will allow President Donald Trump to cement a solid conservative majority on the Supreme Court for the first time in a generation. On July 9th, Trump announces his nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Kavanaugh is a veteran of the George W. Bush White House, where he served as staff secretary, managing every piece of paper that crossed the president's desk. He has spent 12 years on the federal bench. He is a former clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy himself, the man he is nominated to replace. The opposition mobilizes before the announcement is even finished. Progressive interest groups led by Demand Justice have pre-produced television advertisements opposing all four candidates on Trump's publicly released shortlist. Within hours of the announcement, the ads targeting Kavanaugh specifically begin airing nationwide. The procedural battle comes first. Democrats demand the full production of millions of pages of documents from Kavanaugh's three years as White House staff secretary. In that role, he had reviewed nearly every memo, policy proposal, and decision that passed through the Bush White House. Democrats argue that these records are essential to evaluating his judicial philosophy. Republicans and the White House counter that most of the material is routine, covered by executive privilege, or duplicative of the hundreds of thousands of pages already released from his time in the White House counsel's office. The standoff over documents consumes weeks. When the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings finally open on September 4th, the atmosphere is unlike anything the chamber has seen. Democrats spend the first 90 minutes attempting to adjourn or postpone the proceedings entirely. Simultaneously, highly organized, rotating protests erupt inside the hearing room. Activists affiliated with progressive organizations stand up in the public gallery one after another, shouting down senators in carefully timed intervals. On the first day of hearings alone, Capitol Police arrest 70 people for disorderly conduct. By the end of the week, protest-related arrests exceed 227. The atmosphere is deeply polarized and openly chaotic before a single personal accusation is introduced. But behind the scenes, a different document has been circulating for weeks. Feinstein's office holds the letter for over six weeks. Ford's request for confidentiality is maintained throughout the committee hearings, through the document fights, through days of testimony. No Democratic senator raises the allegation. Then, on September 12th, the Intercept publishes an article revealing the existence of a confidential letter held by a senior Democratic senator, alleging misconduct by the nominee. The story does not name Ford, but within 48 hours, the details are leaked to additional outlets. On September 16th, with her anonymity destroyed, Christine Blasey Ford agrees to go public. The Washington Post publishes her full account and identifies her by name. The scheduled Senate vote is immediately postponed. A public, nationally televised hearing is set for September 27th. In the days between Ford's public identification and the scheduled hearing, two additional allegations emerge. Neither survive scrutiny. On September 23rd, the New Yorker, in a story by Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer, publishes an allegation by Deborah Ramirez, a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh's during their freshman year in 1983. Ramirez claims that during a dormitory drinking game, Kavanaugh exposed himself and thrust his penis in her face, and that she inadvertently touched it while pushing him away. The timeline of Ramirez's account, however, raises immediate questions about its reliability. Ramirez had initially been reluctant to name Kavanaugh publicly. She cited significant gaps in her own memory, attributing them to heavy intoxication at the time of the alleged event. Senate Democratic staffers from her home state of Colorado connected her with attorney Stanley Garnett, a former Democratic district attorney. Ramirez then engaged in six days of what she described as carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney. Only after those six days of guided memory reconstruction did she state publicly that she was confident Kavanaugh was the person involved. The New Yorker itself acknowledged in its reporting that it had been unable to confirm that Kavanaugh was present at the party in question, and that the magazine had contacted several dozen classmates, none of whom could corroborate her account. Three days after the Ramirez story, attorney Michael Avenatti introduces a third accuser. Julie Swetnick submits a sworn declaration making the most explosive allegations of the entire process. She claims that in the early 1980s, she attended more than 10 house parties where Kavanaugh and his high school friend Mark Judge were present. She alleges that the boys spiked punch with drugs and grain alcohol to incapacitate girls, and that they participated in gang rapes of unconscious or impaired women at these parties. She states that she herself was drugged and sexually assaulted at one such party in 1982. The allegations are extraordinary and they begin to collapse almost immediately. On October 1, Swetnick sits for a nationally televised interview on NBC with journalist Kate Snow. Under direct questioning, she walks back her primary claims one by one. She admits she never actually saw Kavanaugh Spike drinks. She cannot confirm he was involved in any drugging. She did not directly observe him committing a sexual assault. When Snow presses her on the gang rape lineups she described in her sworn affidavit, Sweatnick changes her characterization, saying the boys were not lined up but were, quote, huddled by the doors. On October 25th, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, formally refers both Swetnik and Avenatti to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation, citing potential false statements to Congress and obstruction of a congressional proceeding. Meanwhile, the committee turns its attention to the three people Christine Blossey Ford had named as present at the 1982 gathering. Their responses, submitted under penalty of felony prosecution, are unambiguous. Leland Ingham Keyser, whom Ford describes as her close high school friend and a guest at the party, submits a statement through her attorney. Quote, Simply put, Miss Keyser does not know Mr. Kavanaugh, and she has no recollection of ever being had a party or gathering where he was present, with or without Dr. Ford, end quote. Mark Judge, the second boy Ford placed in the room during the alleged assault, submits a sworn statement denying any memory of the party and stating he had never seen Kavanaugh act in the manner described. Patrick J. Smith also submits a statement under penalty of perjury. He states he has no knowledge of the party in question and no knowledge of the allegations. None of the three witnesses named by the accuser corroborate the gathering, the location, the date, or the alleged assault. On September 27th, the televised hearing begins. Ford delivers her testimony first. She is emotional, detailed, and unwavering on the central claim. She says she is 100% certain that Brett Kavanaugh was the person who assaulted her. When asked what she remembers most from the alleged event, she answers, quote, the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two, and they're having fun at my expense. End quote. That afternoon, Brett Kavanaugh takes the chair. He is visibly shaking. His opening statement runs 45 minutes and is delivered in a tone that veers between rage, grief, and defiance. He categorically denies the allegations. He presents pages from his personal 1982 calendar, a green and white Northwestern mutual calendar, on which his 17-year-old self recorded daily activities with surprising granularity, football workouts, church visits, college interviews, and weekend plans. He argues that if a gathering of the kind Ford described had occurred, it would appear somewhere in these entries. He accuses the opposition of replacing, quote, advise and consent, end quote, with a quote, search and destroy, end quote, political hit campaign. He says, quote, this confirmation process has become a national disgrace. You have replaced advise and consent with search and destroy, end quote. To resolve the impasse, President Trump orders a supplemental FBI background investigation. The FBI contacts 11 individuals and interviews 10, including all named witnesses. On October 4th, the Bureau delivers its supplemental report to the Senate. The investigation finds no corroboration of the allegations made by Ford or Ramirez. On October 6, 2018, the full Senate holds the final vote. Outside the Capitol, massive crowds gather in protest. A group of demonstrators pushes past police barricades and scales the steps of the Supreme Court building itself, pounding on the bronze entrance doors. Capitol Police arrest 164 people. Inside the chamber, the vote is 50 to 48. Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed. One Republican, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, votes present instead of no, as a courtesy to a colleague who was absent for his daughter's wedding. One Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, votes yes. Every other vote falls along strict party lines. Two years later, the nation is plunged into a fresh crisis. On September 18, 2020, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a towering icon of the progressive legal movement, dies at the age of 87 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. Her death occurs 46 days before a presidential election. On September 26, President Trump announces his nominee, Judge Amy Coney Barrett of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Barrett is 48 years old. She is a former Notre Dame law professor and a former clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, the intellectual architect of modern originalism. She is the mother of seven children, including two adopted from Haiti and one with Down syndrome. She is a devout Catholic. The confirmation process that follows is the fastest in modern history, three days from nomination to final vote, 38 days from Ginsburg's death to a new justice being sworn in. Because of the extraordinary speed and the proximity to the election, progressive groups and Senate Democrats mount a fierce opposition. They raise legitimate procedural objections about the compressed timeline. They argue that the vacancy should be filled by the winner of the upcoming election, citing the precedent Republicans themselves set in 2016 when they refuse to hold hearings for Merritt Garland. But the opposition also moves into territory that raises constitutional alarms. It targets Barrett's personal religious faith. The foundation for this line of attack had been laid three years earlier, during Barrett's 2017 confirmation hearing for the Seventh Circuit. During that hearing, Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein questioned Barrett about a law review article she had co-authored as a law professor. Feinstein then delivered a statement that became instantly famous: quote, the dogma lives loudly within you, and that's of concern, end quote. The line drew immediate backlash from religious liberty advocates across the political spectrum who argued that Feinstein was applying an unconstitutional religious test for public office. Article 6 of the Constitution states explicitly quote, no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to Any office or public trust under the United States. End quote. During that same 2017 hearing, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois pressed Barrett further. He asked her directly, quote, Do you consider yourself an Orthodox Catholic? Barrett responded carefully, quote, if you're asking whether I'm a faithful Catholic, I am, but my personal church attendance and beliefs would not bear on the discharge of my duties as a judge. End quote. In 2020, with Barrett now nominated to the Supreme Court, the framing expands beyond her personal beliefs to target her community. Barrett is a member of People of Praise, a small ecumenical, charismatic Christian community founded in South Bend, Indiana in 1971. The group is interdenominational, drawing members from Catholic, Protestant, and evangelical traditions. It has approximately 1,600 adult members across 22 cities. Members make a voluntary, non-binding covenant to support one another in their faith, and the community organizes itself around small groups, shared prayer, and mutual accountability. Within days of Barrett's nomination, major media outlets begin drawing explicit comparisons between People of Praise and Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale, in which women are forced into sexual servitude by a theocratic regime. The connection point, People of Praise had historically used the title Handmaid for its senior female leaders, a term drawn from the Gospel of Luke, in which the Virgin Mary describes herself as the handmaid of the Lord. Newsweek publishes an article with the headline, How charismatic Catholic groups like Amy Coney Barrett's People of Praise inspired the Handmaid's Tale. Reuters runs similar coverage. The framing is picked up across cable news and social media, where the hashtag Under His Eye, a greeting used by the subjugated women in the novel, trends in connection with Barrett's name. The framing, however, does not survive fact-checking. Author Margaret Atwood herself confirms that the Handmaid's Tale was not inspired by People of Praise. The group that inspired elements of the novel was a completely different organization, the People of Hope, a separate Catholic charismatic community based in New Jersey. Newsweek and other outlets are forced to issue corrections, many of them quiet and buried. The People of Praise community, for its part, had already changed the title from handmaid to woman leader years before Barrett's nomination, precisely because they anticipated the potential for confusion. During the hearings, Barrett affirms her commitment to the judicial oath, stating clearly and repeatedly that she would follow the law and separate her personal faith from her legal duties. When asked about the Feinstein Exchange from 2017, she says, quote, I would decide cases according to the rule of law. I have done that on the Seventh Circuit. Judges can't just wake up one day and say, I have an agenda. I like guns, I hate guns, I like abortion, I hate abortion, and walk in like a royal queen and impose their will on the world. End quote. On October 22nd, the Senate Judiciary Committee votes 12 to 0 to advance the nomination. Every Democratic member boycotts the vote in protest, leaving their chairs empty. Four days later, on October 26, 2020, the full Senate confirms Amy Coney Barrett by a vote of 52 to 48. She is sworn in that same evening on the South Lawn of the White House. The rapid succession of three conservative appointments under a single president, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, solidifies a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court. In the years that follow, the court issues a series of landmark rulings, including the Dobbs decision in June 2022, which overturns Roe v. Wade after nearly 50 years. The reaction is seismic, and it spills from the political arena into the personal lives of the justices. In May 2022, weeks before the Dobbs decision is officially released, someone inside the Supreme Court leaks a full draft of the majority opinion to Politico. It is the first time in the modern history of the court that a draft opinion has been leaked to the public before its official publication. The leak is widely interpreted as an attempt to pressure the justices to change their votes before the ruling is finalized. Protests immediately form outside the private homes of conservative justices in Maryland and Virginia. Demonstrators march on residential streets, chanting and carrying signs outside the houses where the justices live with their families. A federal statute, Title 18, Section 1507, makes it a crime to picket or parade near a judge's residence with the intent to influence their decisions. The law is not enforced. Then, on June 8, 2022, the threat turns from protest to attempted assassination. That is the morning we described at the opening of this episode. Nicholas John Rosk, 26 years old, arrives by taxi at 1.50 in the morning outside Brett Kavanaugh's home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, carrying a loaded Glock 17, a tactical chest rig, ammunition, a knife, pepper spray, zip ties, a hammer, a crowbar, and lockpick tools. He later tells law enforcement that he intended to kill the justice to prevent future rulings on gun control and abortion, and that he planned to take his own life afterward. He is stopped only because he sees the U.S. Marshal stationed outside the house and calls his sister, who persuades him to surrender. He dials 911 himself. Rosk pleads guilty. He is sentenced to 26 years in federal prison. In direct response to the assassination attempt, Congress passes the Supreme Court Police Parity Act of 2022. The law extends federal protective authority to the immediate family members of the justices, closing a gap that had left spouses and children without the same protection afforded to the justices themselves. The Senate passes the bill unanimously. In the House, the vote is 396 to 27. All 27 no votes come from Democrats. But the security threats do not end with Rosk. On Wednesday, May 27, 2026, the crisis reaches Justice Amy Coney Barrett. At approximately 9.02 in the evening, a call comes in to the Fairfax County, Virginia Police Department's non-emergency line. The caller, who identifies himself as a neighbor, reports hearing two or three gunshots and loud arguing coming from Barrett's private residence in Fairfax County. The call is a hoax. It is a swatting attempt, the dangerous practice of making a false emergency report to provoke an armed tactical police response at an innocent person's home. When aimed at a location already protected by an armed federal security detail, the potential for a deadly confrontation between responding officers and the protection team is extreme. But the system built after Roski's arrest works exactly as designed. Barrett's address is flagged in the Fairfax County Police Computer-Aided Dispatch System as a location of interest, with a notation indicating 24-hour security coverage for a high-priority resident. Dispatchers relay this flag to responding officers in real time. They warn the units that the call is highly likely a swatting attempt. Officers attempt to call back the original number. The caller cannot be reached, further confirming the flag. Instead of arriving with sirens, tactical gear, and weapons drawn, which could have triggered a catastrophic confrontation with the Supreme Court police protection detail already stationed at the home, Fairfax County officers coordinate a quiet, low-impact response. They arrive calmly, they meet with the on-site security team. Within minutes, they confirm there is no gunfire, no disturbance, and no emergency. The hoax is diffused without incident, without injury, without a single weapon being drawn. The next morning, May 28, 2026, Justice Amy Coney Barrett appears on the Supreme Court bench as scheduled. She reads opinions she has authored. She makes no public comment about the previous night's events. The federal investigation into the source of the false call remains active and ongoing. Four decades after the rejection of Robert Bork, the war over the Supreme Court has fundamentally altered the American constitutional system. What began as a debate over one man's judicial philosophy in 1987 has become a permanent, well-funded, self-sustaining industry. The confirmation process is no longer a constitutional exercise of advice and consent, it is a battlefield. The financial scale of this industry is visible in public tax filings and campaign finance disclosures. Progressive dark money networks anchored by Arabella advisors and its fiscal sponsors, including the 1630 fund and its judicial arm, Demand Justice, spent an estimated $5 million opposing Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 and $10 million opposing Amy Coney Barrett in 2020. On the conservative side, the Concord Fund and the Judicial Crisis Network raised and spent matching sums from anonymous donors to run supportive countercampaigns for each nominee. The total identifiable spending on Supreme Court confirmation battles across the Kavanaugh and Barrett fights exceeded $30 million combined. Compare that to 1987. The entire Bork fight, the most expensive judicial confirmation battle in history at the time, cost approximately $18 million. In 2020, the brief 30-day confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett saw matching multimillion dollar advertising operations deployed and saturating airwaves within a single week of her nomination. The money has grown, the infrastructure has professionalized, and the organizations that raise and spend it do not disclose who funds them. The escalation has followed a clear, traceable path. In 1987, the weapon was ideology. Ted Kennedy attacked Robert Bork's legal philosophy and translated it into political advertising. The target was a nominee's ideas. In 1991, the weapon was personal accusation. A confidential affidavit was leaked to the press 48 hours before a scheduled vote, forcing the reopening of hearings and the public exposure of private allegations. The target was a nominee's character. In 2006, the weapon was guilt by association. A single line on a 21-year-old job application was used to imply bigotry without evidence of any active participation. The target was a nominee's past. In 2018, the weapon was a coordinated cascade. A confidential letter held for weeks was leaked at the last possible moment. Additional accusations, one involving six days of guided memory reconstruction and another that collapsed on live television, were deployed in rapid succession. The target was a nominee's adolescence. In 2020, the weapon was faith. A nominee's membership in a small religious community was framed through the lens of dystopian fiction. A sitting United States Senator told a federal judicial nominee that her religious conviction was, quote, of concern. The target was a nominee's beliefs. By 2022, the consequences had escaped the Senate chamber entirely. A man traveled 2,000 miles with a loaded weapon and confessed plans to assassinate a sitting justice. By 2026, someone placed a false call designed to draw armed police to a justice's home at 9 o'clock at night, creating the conditions for a potentially lethal confrontation. The through line is direct, it is documented, and it has not stopped. The history of borking reveals what happens when a constitutional process designed to evaluate the qualifications of a judicial nominee is repurposed as a tool of political warfare. Each escalation lowers the threshold for the next. Each tactic that goes unanswered becomes the baseline for the cycle that follows, and the cost is not measured only in dollars, or in political capital, or in the reputations of the men and women who are nominated. The cost is measured in the erosion of the idea that the rule of law can exist apart from the exercise of raw political power. The men and women who sit on the Supreme Court are not combatants, they are judges, they have families, they have children who go to school and spouses who go to work. They live in houses on residential streets, next to neighbors who mow their lawns. The system was designed so that their job would be to interpret the Constitution. It was not designed so that they would need armed guards stationed in their driveways. Whether you agree with any particular justices' rulings or not, the pattern is clear. When the process of confirming them is turned into a mechanism of personal destruction, the destruction eventually becomes literal. This has been a special feature-length SOS deep dive on the history of Borking. Every claim in this episode is drawn from publicly available Senate records, contemporaneous news reporting, published polling data, court filings, congressional testimony, and official government documents. We have not editorialized, we have not told you what to think. We have presented the documented history and let the facts speak. If you want to support our mission of delivering factual, spin-free news, share this episode with someone. That is how we grow, and that is how these stories stay in the light. Thank you for listening to SOS Deep Dive from Stripped Out News. I will see you next week.