Posted on 09/13/2009 2:54:47 PM PDT by Steelfish
The Trial of John Roberts
By JEFFREY ROSEN September 12, 2009
FOUR years ago, when John Roberts became chief justice of the United States, he said that he hoped to emulate the modesty and unanimity of his greatest predecessor, John Marshall. But if Chief Justice Roberts presides over a broad, ideologically divided ruling in a campaign finance case the court heard last week, he risks being remembered instead as a conservative Earl Warren.
For decades conservatives have attacked Warren, who was chief justice from 1953 to 1969, as the face of liberal judicial activism. They have criticized him for presiding over a court that imposed a contested vision of social justice on an unwilling nation — overturning decades of precedents and scores of federal and state laws in the process.
Moreover, conservatives view Warren as a Machiavellian former politician (he had been governor of California) who used incremental strategies to pursue radical ends — handing down a series of cautious decisions that favored the police, for example, and then tying their hands by requiring officers to read suspects their rights in the 5-to-4 Miranda decision of 1966.
Likewise, if the Roberts court issues a sweeping 5-to-4 decision in the current case, Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, striking down longstanding bans on corporate campaign expenditures, it would define John Roberts as indelibly as Miranda defined Earl Warren. And there is no reason for the court to do so: it would be easy for the justices to rule narrowly in the Citizens United case, holding that the corporate-financed political material in question — a documentary called “Hillary: the Movie” — isn’t the kind of campaign ad that federal law was intended to regulate.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
A conservative Earl Warren is ok with me.
Some day we'll dig his bones up, drag them around the streets of Washington, and then take him down to the sewage treatment facility to deal with them in a proper form.
me too
We are due one. A good indicator of whether he is doing a good job is how much the kooks the NYT digs up for opinion pieces don’t like him. Hopefully he’s not a typical Republican seduced by the cocktail circuit.
According to the NYT, being a judicial activist is hunky-dorry, as long as you are a LIBERAL judicial activist.
Enforcing the U.S. Constitution to theses a##holes means it's "Conservative Activism"?????
Gimme a break....we've gone off the deep end with these socialist bastards, IMHO.
So there you have it: the libs believe that actually reading what is in the Constitution and following what it says is out of control “Judicial Activism”....
The New York Times is scared that George Soros is about to lose his monopoly on US politics, and is now trying desperately to influence the High Court’s decision with threats to John Roberts’ popularity around the offices of the New York Times.
This is the same paper than ran a column by Thomas Friedman calling for a Chinese one-party autocracy here didn’t it?
The MSM monopoly on political speech would be broken again...that’s their only worry.
I stand by that prediction.
REVOLUTION.
LLS
Unfortunately Earl Warren is one of the very largest keys to the destruction of America and the election of a marxist zealot.
Yet his revisions are taken as rightly settled and great foundational starting points by some libertines on Free Republic.
Something that should never be forgotten about Earl Warren was that back when he was a politician in California, he hoped to get the vote of the Dust Bowl migrants, mostly from Oklahoma and Texas.
This was in the time of the Nisei camps, the Japanese internment camps. But by that time, military counterintelligence had concluded that the Japanese there posed no threat. But Earl Warren, coldly calculating that the “Oakies” were ignorant racists, convinced the Frank Roosevelt administration to leave the harmless Japanese in the camps.
He figured that he could appeal to the “Oakies” great desire to get work when little was available, by pointing out that they could take the jobs of the “hated Japs”, thanks to him.
It didn’t work. Not only weren’t the “Oakies” hateful racists, but they saw in Earl Warren the kind of low order scoundrel who would steal from widows and orphans. Even poor, they had bushels more character and honor than he ever did.
This NY Times person neglects only one minor detail: the First Amendment to the Constitution. If that’s what gets in the way of “Campaign Finance Laws”, then that’s the way it ought to be.
Yes, there are some Libertines on FR.
From the NYT perspective restoring and applying the Constitution is activist.
If they want to own up to being libertines, so be it, but to use the obvious unconstitutional revisions of Earl Warren’s liberal activist court as anything but rank liberalism and judicial activism run amok is shameful.
I’m sure Earl Warren was a Libertine in his spare time.
I do not know what Earl Warren did in his spare time, but his passion was to be the lawless, for he behaved as if he was far above the law.
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