Shooshmoo
Well-known member
I think this ties in pretty well with the "Let's just say it: Republicans are the problem" thread.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/05/21/120521fa_fact_toobin?currentPage=all
Very long, but I thought this part was the most interesting:
"John Paul Stevens was just short of ninety at the time of Citizens United, and he belonged to a vanishing political tradition—that of the moderate Midwestern Republican. His first sponsor for a federal judgeship was Senator Charles Percy; Gerald Ford appointed Stevens to the Court based on the recommendation of his Attorney General, Edward Levi, who had been the dean of the University of Chicago Law School. For decades, moderate Republicans had played crucial roles on the Supreme Court: John Marshall Harlan II, in the fifties; Potter Stewart, in the sixties; Lewis Powell, in the seventies and eighties; and O’Connor, in the nineties and the new millennium. In his early years on the Court, Stevens settled into the ideological center, between William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, on the left, and Rehnquist, then an Associate Justice, and Chief Justice Warren Burger, on the right. Stevens’s voting record was roughly in line with the Republican appointees such as Stewart, Powell, Harry Blackmun, and O’Connor.
But as Justices were replaced by more contemporary Republicans, Stevens often found himself described as a liberal. He did move to the left, especially on the death penalty. But his evolution into the leader of the liberal wing was mostly the result of the rest of the Court moving so far to the right.
Stevens became the senior Associate Justice after Blackmun stepped down, in 1994, and during the next decade he was confident that he could pull together majorities for his side. Toward the end of the Rehnquist Court, Stevens had a string of good years, as O’Connor became a frequent ally, especially on issues relating to Guantánamo. Kennedy, too, joined Stevens’s side on gay rights and some death-penalty cases. More often than his liberal colleagues, Stevens voted to review controversial cases. Ginsburg and Breyer, fearing disaster if the Court took these cases, tended to prefer not to address them.
But John Roberts and Samuel Alito sapped John Paul Stevens’s optimism. In less than five years, the pair of Bush appointees, joined by Scalia, Thomas, and, usually, Kennedy, had overturned many of the Court’s precedents. Unlike his new conservative colleagues, Stevens, like Souter, thought that the law should develop slowly, over time, with each case building logically on its predecessors. The course of Citizens United represented everything that offended Stevens most about the Roberts Court.
In some ways, Stevens’s greatest objections were procedural. Like Ginsburg (and almost no one else), Stevens had a deep fascination with the mysteries of federal procedure. He was happy to wade into the subject for hours. (Stevens was the only Justice who generally wrote his own first drafts of opinions.) So it was especially galling that the Court converted Citizens United from a narrow dispute about the application of a single provision in McCain-Feingold to an assault on a century of federal laws and precedents. To Stevens, it was the purest kind of judicial activism.
Or, as he put it in his dissenting opinion, “Five Justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/05/21/120521fa_fact_toobin?currentPage=all
Very long, but I thought this part was the most interesting:
"John Paul Stevens was just short of ninety at the time of Citizens United, and he belonged to a vanishing political tradition—that of the moderate Midwestern Republican. His first sponsor for a federal judgeship was Senator Charles Percy; Gerald Ford appointed Stevens to the Court based on the recommendation of his Attorney General, Edward Levi, who had been the dean of the University of Chicago Law School. For decades, moderate Republicans had played crucial roles on the Supreme Court: John Marshall Harlan II, in the fifties; Potter Stewart, in the sixties; Lewis Powell, in the seventies and eighties; and O’Connor, in the nineties and the new millennium. In his early years on the Court, Stevens settled into the ideological center, between William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, on the left, and Rehnquist, then an Associate Justice, and Chief Justice Warren Burger, on the right. Stevens’s voting record was roughly in line with the Republican appointees such as Stewart, Powell, Harry Blackmun, and O’Connor.
But as Justices were replaced by more contemporary Republicans, Stevens often found himself described as a liberal. He did move to the left, especially on the death penalty. But his evolution into the leader of the liberal wing was mostly the result of the rest of the Court moving so far to the right.
Stevens became the senior Associate Justice after Blackmun stepped down, in 1994, and during the next decade he was confident that he could pull together majorities for his side. Toward the end of the Rehnquist Court, Stevens had a string of good years, as O’Connor became a frequent ally, especially on issues relating to Guantánamo. Kennedy, too, joined Stevens’s side on gay rights and some death-penalty cases. More often than his liberal colleagues, Stevens voted to review controversial cases. Ginsburg and Breyer, fearing disaster if the Court took these cases, tended to prefer not to address them.
But John Roberts and Samuel Alito sapped John Paul Stevens’s optimism. In less than five years, the pair of Bush appointees, joined by Scalia, Thomas, and, usually, Kennedy, had overturned many of the Court’s precedents. Unlike his new conservative colleagues, Stevens, like Souter, thought that the law should develop slowly, over time, with each case building logically on its predecessors. The course of Citizens United represented everything that offended Stevens most about the Roberts Court.
In some ways, Stevens’s greatest objections were procedural. Like Ginsburg (and almost no one else), Stevens had a deep fascination with the mysteries of federal procedure. He was happy to wade into the subject for hours. (Stevens was the only Justice who generally wrote his own first drafts of opinions.) So it was especially galling that the Court converted Citizens United from a narrow dispute about the application of a single provision in McCain-Feingold to an assault on a century of federal laws and precedents. To Stevens, it was the purest kind of judicial activism.
Or, as he put it in his dissenting opinion, “Five Justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.”