Bork famously opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned racial discrimination. Just 45 minutes after Reagan announced his nominee, Democratic senator Ted Kennedy stood up in the Senate and declared that Bork's America was "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", and "schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution". Former US president Gerald Ford, left, introduces Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, centre, in 1987. Credit:AP Bork insisted Kennedy's statement was false, yet the speech succeeded in framing the nominee as an extremist who would decide cases based on his ideological beliefs. Bork later performed poorly at his confirmation hearings and the Senate rejected his nomination. "Bork" is now listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb meaning to obstruct someone, especially a candidate for public office, by systematically defaming or vilifying them.

Reagan eventually appointed Anthony Kennedy, a more moderate conservative who became the court's new swing judge. Kennedy provided a key vote in a 1992 decision upholding the right to abortion and in 2015 authored the historic decision legalising same-sex marriage. In June, Kennedy announced he was stepping down from the court, providing Trump with an opportunity to succeed where Reagan failed and cement a 5-4 conservative majority on the court. In an echo of Reagan's original choice, the Senate is now furiously debating the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh, Trump's nominee as Kennedy's replacement. 'The importance cannot be overstated' But while appointments to the Supreme Court attract the most attention, it only hears around 80 cases a year. Most important decisions about immigration, abortion and guns are made at the appellate court level.

And when it comes to judicial appointments, the Trump administration has been the epitome of competence. He has avoided the mishaps that have marred past Republican presidencies, packing the lower-tier courts with dependably conservative, usually well-credentialled judges - including some who have made controversial statements about abortion and gay rights. They are also younger than the usual judge, meaning they will be making decisions for decades after Trump leaves office. Since his inauguration, the Senate has approved 60 of Trump's judicial nominees, including 33 district court judges and 26 appellate court judges. Trump has appointed more appellate court judges in his first two years in office than any other president in history. One of these nominees was Omaha lawyer Leonard Steven Grasz. In 1996, Grasz described the legacy of landmark abortion ruling Roe v Wade as “moral bankruptcy”. The non-partisan American Bar Association gave him the lowest possible rating of a unanimous "not qualified", making him just the fourth nominee in 30 years to receive such a verdict. The association said it had serious questions about Grasz’s temperament and his ability “to separate his role as an advocate from that of a judge”. Nevertheless the Senate, voting along partisan lines, confirmed Grasz and he now serves as a judge on the US Court of Appeals.

Another was John Bush, chairman of the Federalist Society's Louisville chapter. It was revealed during his confirmation hearings that he had written a blog disparaging gay rights, comparing abortion to slavery and promoting articles claiming Barack Obama was born outside America. He also now serves as a US Court of Appeals judge. Not all Trump's nominees have proven so successful. The White House last year abandoned the nomination of Brett Talley after it was revealed he had never argued a case in federal court. Talley, rated "not qualified" by the bar association, was also outed as a member of a ghost-hunting club, the Tuscaloosa Paranormal Research Group. The administration also dropped plans to appoint Jeff Mateer, who once described transgender children as evidence of “Satan’s plan", to a district court position in Texas. The vast majority of Trump's nominees, however, have been rated as "well qualified" or "qualified" and are usually graduates of the country's most prestigious law schools.

“We’re filling up the courts with really talented people who understand and read the Constitution for what it says,” Trump told Time magazine last year. “It’s already having a tremendous impact. These appointments are going to be one of the most important things, if not the most important thing, we do.” Former House speaker Newt Gingrich said earlier this year: "The importance of this dramatic reshaping of the entire federal court system cannot be overstated." A conservative counter-revolution Trump's success here has a long history that can also be traced back to Bork. Five years before his failed bid to join the Supreme Court, Bork participated in another event that changed the course of American politics. The title of the meeting at Yale University - "A Symposium on Federalism: Legal and Political Ramifications" - sounded banal but the energy at the gathering of 200 conservative lawyers was electric.

“I sense that we are at one of those points in history where the pendulum may be beginning to swing in another direction,” Ted Olson, then an assistant attorney-general in the Department of Justice, declared. The event was the birth of the Federalist Society, a group dedicated to combating the dominance of progressives at the country's most prestigious law schools. It has since become one of the most influential organisations in the country. Amanda Hollis-Brusky, the author of Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution, says the group "has evolved into the de facto gatekeeper for right-of-centre lawyers aspiring to government jobs and federal judgeships under Republican presidents". The society - whose members include Chief Justice John Roberts and three other Supreme Court justices - has created a pipeline of conservatives ready to be appointed to high office. "The network of elite Republican lawyers is small and tightly connected," explains David Fontana, a law professor at George Washington University. "They all know each other well, so when it is time to appoint somebody it’s a faster process."

The group's influence, already impressive, has reached its zenith under Trump. During the 2016 campaign Trump released a list of potential Supreme Court nominees that had been created by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, a free market think tank. As it turned out, neither of Trump's first two appointments were on the initial list. But the gambit worked. "A lot of conservatives didn’t know what to make of Donald Trump at first," says Curt Levey, president of conservative advocacy group the Committee for Justice. "The fact he promised to appoint conservative judges and, for the first time in history, released a list of people he would consider for the Supreme Court was a big part of getting him elected." Levey believes Trump grasped the importance of judicial appointments during his campaign rallies, where his promises to appoint pro-life conservatives to the bench drew loud applause.

Trump's success following through in office helps explain why most Republicans remain so loyal to him, he says. "Although Republicans control all three branches of government, they haven’t exactly been accomplishing much in Washington," Levey adds. "Judges seems to be the one issue that all the factions in the party agree on." Under Trump, more than in past administrations, the process for appointing judges has been centralised in the office of the White House counsel, Donald McGahn, a longtime Federalist Society member. In a speech last year to the society, McGahn said he drew up two lists of potential judges when Trump came to office. The first included "mainstream folks, not a big paper trail, the kind of folks that will get through the Senate and make us feel good that we put some pragmatic folks on the bench".

The second featured "some folks that are too hot for prime time, the kind that would be really hot in the Senate ... the kind of people that make some people nervous". McGahn told the audience he had thrown the first list in the trash, and decided to put the judges on the second list before the Senate for a vote. Too hot for prime time? The apex of all these appointments is Kavanaugh. When Trump announced he would nominate him to the Supreme Court in Kennedy's place, the Democrats' Senate leader Chuck Schumer summed up the panic that swept through progressive America by saying “nothing less than the fate of our healthcare system, reproductive rights for women and countless other protections for middle-class Americans are at stake". Like Bork, Kavanaugh is a Yale graduate who sits on the US Appeals Court for the District of Columbia, the nation's second most powerful court. And like Bork, he is closely aligned to the Republican Party, having served as George W. Bush's staff secretary.

President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, a federal appeals court judge, testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington on Wednesday. Credit:AP During fiery confirmation hearings this week, Senate Democrats have tried to "Bork" Kavanaugh by presenting him as an ideologue with dangerous views on abortion, guns, worker rights and presidential power. Dozens of angry protesters were arrested on the first day of hearings; outside in the corridors, abortion rights activists dressed as handmaids from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a costume choice they said alluded to Kavanaugh's “anti-abortion, anti-healthcare and anti-women" views. It seemed like history was repeating itself. Except it wasn't. In contrast to the Reagan era, Republicans hold a slim Senate majority and none of the party's senators have come out against Kavanaugh's nomination. Fontana says it is a near certainty that Kavanaugh, aged 53, will be appointed to lifetime tenure on the court. There he would join Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, who had a smooth appointment last year.

Levey agrees: “He’s a clearly well-credentialled nominee who hasn’t said or done anything that people will be outraged about. "The Democrats knew from the start this is not someone they could defeat.” Kavanaugh's seemingly unstoppable path to the Supreme Court contrasts with the other big stories from the week: the publication of excerpts from Bob Woodward's new book, Fear: Trump in the White House, and a New York Times opinion article written by an anonymous Trump administration official. Both portrayed the White House as a place of chaos and dysfunction, where staff members battle to rein in the President's worst instincts. Trump's packing of the courts has however been a masterpiece of competence, and he is likely to be able to continue doing it until the 2020 presidential election at least. Polling analyst Nate Silver gives the Democrats a seven-in-nine chance of winning a majority in the House of Representatives in November's midterm elections. But Republicans are favoured to hold on to their majority in the Senate, where judicial nominees are confirmed.