# Ted Kennedy — "Robert Bork's America" > [!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, school children could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy." > — Ted Kennedy, U.S. Senate floor, July 1, 1987 ## Context Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy (D-MA) delivered these words on the Senate floor within hours of President [[Ronald Reagan]]'s July 1, 1987 announcement that he was nominating Judge [[Robert Bork]] to the Supreme Court. The speech reframed the confirmation from a question of Bork's credentials — which were formidable — into a referendum on the concrete consequences of his constitutional philosophy of [[Originalism]]. It set the terms for the [[Bork Hearings]] that followed and for the 58–42 Senate vote that rejected the nomination that October. ## Why this matters The speech is the canonical marker of the moment the fight over [[Originalism]] moved from law-review abstraction into mass politics. Bork's supporters denounced it as a demagogic distortion of a serious jurist's views; his critics read it as an accurate forecast of what a Court built on his premises would do to the rights derived from the [[Fourteenth Amendment]]. Heather Cox Richardson invoked it in her letter of July 9, 2026 precisely because the outcomes Kennedy warned of — the rollback of birthright and civil-rights protections read out of the Fourteenth Amendment — are the ones the KB now tracks in real time. The verb "to bork" — to attack a nominee's record aggressively and publicly — entered the political lexicon from this episode, and the [[Federalist Society]]'s judicial-pipeline strategy is in part a response to it: build a bench of confirmable originalists rather than a single lightning rod. ## Verification - **Primary text:** [Congressional Record via Wikisource](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Robert_Bork%27s_America); floor video at [C-SPAN](https://www.c-span.org/program/senate-highlight/robert-borks-america/36259). - **Status:** Verbatim, undisputed as to substance. The Congressional Record renders "blacks," "school children," and "government" in lowercase; HCR's letter of July 9, 2026 capitalizes "Blacks" and "Government" and compresses "school children" to "schoolchildren." This page follows the primary source. ## Related quotes - Featured on [[Robert Bork]] and in the [[Bork Hearings]] event page.