2000 - Robert Bork                                                                      Home
                                                                                           Supreme Court Candidate


     Sometime in 2000 Robert Bork was on a local talk radio show out of Ft. Myers and I called in to talk to him. I asked him what had happened to the 10th amendment which said that any powers not specifically granted to the federal government in the body of the Constitution were reserved to the states, or the people. He said he was afraid that it was a dead letter.

That stunned me as I expected that he was going to be a defender of it. I wanted to pursue that further but was afraid I wouldn't get to my next question so I went on to the Boland Amendment which was passed to prevent Reagan from funding military activities in Nicaragua, which is why he tried to fund it through missile sales to Iran. I got lost on that issue and wasted my time.

If I ever get another chance to talk to him I'd like to hear him explain how it is that one of the original Bills of Rights can be a dead letter when it has never been repealed. Several states ratified the Constitution based on the assumption that a future Bill of Rights would be added to protect essential liberties of the people and to check the power of the new federal government. The Constitution would have never been ratified without the 10th amendment. I understand that the interstate commerce clause and the welfare clause have been interpreted by judges throughout the country's history to expand the power of the federal government, but I would like to get his view on how this happened and what other court decisions allowed this to happen.

One of the reasons that I was not able to intellectually accomplish what I wanted that day was because I had already begun to smoke crack by that time and my mind was not as sharp as I would have liked.

See My Journey through the Crack World.