know where his positions are. respecting life and all of its forms and times. we know those things will come up. but this is a guy who way back in columbia before it was public will be 80s, he started a paper called the fed. it was a pushback against what he thought was a dominant liberal philosophy and culture on campus. he is not new to this. his mom was the first female director of the epa under reagan. he has even written about confirmation battles and in his opinion, they have become political warfare. the attacks that happen to people who step up and are nominated for these oppositions on the federal bench. he knows what he s walking into. he has criticized the left and says they have come to rely on courtrooms and judges to get their agenda done where they haven t been able to do with voters and the ballot box. the left is not going to like this even though he s got that
pivotal player on the court, despite how he looked coming in under reagan as a rock conservative politically. if you remember from 1987, the first nominee that reagan put up was robert bourque, and it was only have three tries that he was able to get kennedy on the bench but he was approved unanimously, so probably there were enough democrats that thought maybe under that exterior we might get a few votes we like, and they have. that s a big question for tonight, once you get the name will the democrats go all in on this time or wait for the next one and not waste their firepower and change the filibuster and getting mcconnell to change it. what is your take on that? it s going to be a really tough question for them, and tonight, coming down the pike,
too much power and that is music to conservative s ears. so they would like it if gorsuch got the nomination. hardiman as you say has a little more of a mixed background. he s from massachusetts, he drove a cab for his father s cab company. went to notre dame in georgetown, not a harvard law school graduate. gorsuch knows washington. his mother was the administrator r if the environmental protection agency under reagan. first woman to have that job. and he was a senate page while she came back here. he also clerked for justice byron white who was another coloradan like neil gorsuch and anthony kennedy. hardiman has not been a clerk. one has trial judge experience, the other doesn t. so there are differences between the two, but i would say of the two on balance scores gorsuch is slightly more conservative. the city to watch. i grew up around there. i like getting that one in there. pete williams in washington, thank you for that. take a quick break he. up next, the opposition amid
taiwan. since the early 1980s there s been efforts to either lend support to taiwan or even sell arms in this way. so we have basically had a two-tract policy but have maintained that policy. i had ambassador christopher hill on who obviously was in charge of the diplomatic relations between the countries under george w. bush. why is that the policy believed to work? others have come out in the wake of all of this including michael pillsbury who worked under reagan and george w. bush and obama and said it s not a zero sum game anymore. the goal of china has been to normalize relations and hopefully to integrate both countries rather than create an adversarial situation. couldn t this be the first step? not this way. i don t think people are disputing having different relations with taiwan but doing
in person and occasionally on camera. mr. vice president, if you look right down at that monitor, you ll see the man that you ve beaten, senator bob dole who is standing by in his headquarters. anything that you would like to say to him at this point? no, just wish him well and meet him in the south. senator dole, anything that you would like to say to the vice president? yeah, stop lying about my record. anything else you would like to say? the fight between bob dole and george bush that year in 1988 was, in fact, so ugly that it led nbc news to do kind of a strange thing. it was kind of a strange, self-conscious scolding political special in 1988. they aired a special broadcast that year all about how terrible american politics had become. kind of amazing looking back at it. it was the soul-searching thing about american politics, all of a sudden getting so ugly and so disgusting that maybe something was really wrong with us as a people and as a country. just watch this for