[Dianna]

Scalia will be named Chief Justice, and his strict-constructionist position will rule the day.

It isn't as though the Chief Justice gets an extra vote or anything...what IS the big deal about being Chief Justice anyway?

[mwl1]

It isn't as though the Chief Justice gets an extra vote or anything...what IS the big deal about being Chief Justice anyway?

The big deal is that the chief justice assigns the cases to various associate justices, thus trying to shape decisions by putting the right players in the right place.

[BlackElk]

If and only if the CJ is in the majority, he/she decides whose opinion (of those in the majority) will be the decision of the court. In a case like Roe vs. Wade, Warren Burger, as CJ, though he was a pro-lifer personally (this was the subject of a two-part NYT Sunday Magazine article when Burger was retiring), voted in the majority so that he could assign to his old friend Harry (Herod) Blackmun the writing of the Court's opinion. Blackmun then produced the abotion of a decision that is Roe vs. Wade. Confsed, irrational, not at all constitutional and quite reflective of the mediocrity for which Herod was legend.

If Burger did NOT vote in the majority, then the senior justice in the majority (William O. Douglas at that time) would have assigned the decision writing. In that event, the decision might have been competently and coherently written by Douglas's wife or by any pro-abort more capable than Blackmun. In his last published opinion on abortion, Burger admitted that he had long believed Roe vs. Wade to have been wrongly decided and dissented for the first time against abortion to prove it.

CJ = 1.5 AJ. Just my guess.