Relinking Constitutional Law & Jurisprudence to the Constitution

William Kristol, in an article entitled Reversing the Bork Defeat, makes this observation:

On October 23, 1987--a day that lives in conservative infamy--Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by a Democratic Senate. Now, 18 years later, George W. Bush has the chance to reverse this defeat, and to begin to fulfill what has always been one of the core themes of modern American conservatism: the relinking of constitutional law and constitutional jurisprudence to the Constitution.

The restoration of constitutional government has been the one area in which modern conservatism has had the least success. From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, conservative economic policies have been (more or less) pursued, and, when pursued, have been vindicated. From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, conservative foreign policies based on American strength and American principles have been--when pursued--remarkably successful. One might even say that, in both economics and foreign policy, the degree of conservative success has been far greater than anyone would have imagined in 1980.

But in the area of constitutionalism, conservative goals have been thwarted, and the key moment of failure, from which conservative constitutionalism has never recovered, was the Bork defeat in 1987. For the last 18 years constitutional jurisprudence has continued to drift away from a sound constitutionalism based on the written Constitution and a proper deference to popular self-government in many areas of public life. Bork's defeat was both a cause and a symbol of this continued downward drift...