Slight correction; it was John Tower, a potential Defense Secretary nominee whose nomination was scuttled when a local paper got hold of his video rental records. He wasn't in congress at the time.
EDIT: I should add that accessing his video rental history was used as an example and a counter to Bork's own anti-privacy position, which is probably the real reason his nomination was rejected (although I can't say for sure since I'm no expert in this stuff and this all happened before I was even born)
You'll find the info at the following link under the "U.S. Supreme Court Nomination" section:
So thanks for the rabbit hole!
>During debate over his nomination, Bork's video rental history was leaked to the press. His video rental history was unremarkable, and included such harmless titles as A Day at the Races, Ruthless People, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Writer Michael Dolan, who obtained a copy of the hand-written list of rentals, wrote about it for the Washington City Paper.[36] Dolan justified accessing the list on the ground that Bork himself had stated that Americans had only such privacy rights as afforded them by direct legislation. The incident led to the enactment of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act.[37][38]
>To pro-choice rights legal groups, Bork's originalist views and his belief that the Constitution did not contain a general "right to privacy" were viewed as a clear signal that, should he become a justice of the Supreme Court, he would vote to reverse the Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Accordingly, a large number of groups mobilized to press for Bork's rejection, and the resulting 1987 Senate confirmation hearings became an intensely partisan battle.
> informal US
> Obstruct (someone, especially a candidate for public office) by systematically defaming or vilifying them.
> Origin
> 1980s from the name of Robert Bork (1927–2012), an American judge whose nomination to the Supreme Court (1987) was rejected following unfavourable publicity for his allegedly extreme views.
It would seem strange that a political etymology had a specific impact on the computing world. But the mistype of broken as "borken", and further mis-grammaring to borked would seem consistent with the humour of computing people IME.
The use in computer circles is also just one of "generally broken" (or utterly broken, perhaps) rather than "politically discreditted". I think they might be just coincidental homonyms.
Here's a [not particularly] interesting prior use: https://archive.org/details/Florida_Flambeau_1959/page/n221?... someone borked the pronounciation in Russian of beetroot soup ("borsht", Russian "s" is with a "c" shaped letter).
https://web.archive.org/web/20071009150938/http://www.theame...
But note that Bork was not a mainline candidate -- he had some significant baggage and was well outside the legal mainstream in his opinions on privacy. It was that latter thing that sank Bork, who held that there is no guarantee of privacy.
https://schoolworkhelper.net/robert-borks-the-right-of-priva...
The baggage was related to Watergate. When it became apparent to Nixon that Watergate was going to sink him, Nixon tried to get the special prosecutor dismissed. Nobody would do it, except Bork:
> Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox; Richardson refused and resigned effective immediately. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox; Ruckelshaus refused, and also resigned. Nixon then ordered the third-most-senior official at the Justice Department, Solicitor General Robert Bork, to fire Cox. Bork considered resigning, but instead carried out the dismissal as Nixon asked.