Politics & Power Quote by Robert Bork

Bork’s line is a scalpel disguised as a shrug: it flips a phrase usually deployed as a warning - “at the mercy of legislative majorities” - into a blunt reminder that this is the whole point of the system. The intent is argumentative, not descriptive. He’s policing the boundaries of legitimate complaint, suggesting that what critics frame as vulnerability is actually constitutional design: elected lawmakers, responsive to voters, make the rules; courts don’t exist to launder political losses into legal victories.

The subtext is a shot across the bow at rights-talk untethered from text, history, or democratic consent. Bork, a leading voice of originalism and a skeptic of expansive substantive due process, is pushing back against the late-20th-century judiciary’s growing role as national referee on contested social questions. Read in the shadow of his bruising 1987 Supreme Court confirmation battle, the quote doubles as self-defense: if you fear majorities, you’re really asking for governance by an unelected minority, and you should admit it.

What makes the line work is its rhetorical judo. “Mercy” implies arbitrariness and menace; Bork drains it of melodrama by translating it into civics. It’s also a dare: accept the discomfort of politics, or confess you prefer rule by judges. Of course, the phrase elides the American system’s built-in mistrust of pure majoritarianism - rights guarantees, federalism, bicameralism, judicial review. That tension is the real context: America is designed to be governed by majorities, but not simply, not cleanly, and never without a fight over who counts as “the majority” and which questions are allowed to be put to a vote.