Posted on 01/25/2010 1:54:38 PM PST by reaganaut1
The Supreme Court announced its big campaign finance decision at 10 in the morning last Thursday. By 10:30 a.m., after Justice Anthony M. Kennedy had offered a brisk summary of the majority opinion and Justice John Paul Stevens labored through a 20-minute rebuttal, a sort of twilight had settled over the courtroom.
It seemed the Stevens era was ending.
Justice Stevens, who will turn 90 in April, joined the court in 1975 and is the longest-serving justice by more than a decade. He has given signals that he intends to retire at the end of this term, and his dissent on Thursday was shot through with disappointment, frustration and uncharacteristic sarcasm.
He seemed weary, and more than once he stumbled over and mispronounced ordinary words in the lawyer’s lexicon — corruption, corporation, allegation. Sometimes he would take a second or third run at the word, sometimes not.
But there was no mistaking his basic message. “The rule announced today — that Congress must treat corporations exactly like human speakers in the political realm — represents a radical change in the law,” he said from the bench. “The court’s decision is at war with the views of generations of Americans.”
That was the plainspoken style of the last years of Justice Stevens’s tenure. In cases involving prisoners held without charge at Guantánamo Bay and the mentally retarded on death row, his version of American justice was propelled by common sense and moral clarity, and it commanded a majority. He was on the short end of the 2008 decision finding that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to bear arms, and he had mixed success in fighting what he saw as illegitimate justifications for discrimination against African-Americans, women and homosexuals.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Stevens was a Ford appointee. Gerry overruled the objections of the conservative wing of the Party (which he and the Bushes really cared about only at election time; at all other times, we were “distractions” and embarassments interrupting polite Saturday golf with Tip O’Neill and the other congressional liberals) and appointed the most liberal Supreme Court Judge since William O. Douglass. So, there was precedent for Bush Sr.’s ridiculous appointment of David Souter.
An interesting idea. It would require a Constitutional ammendment, though. I wonder how each side, Republican and Democrat, would respond to the plan. I think the Democrats would come out overwhelmingly against it, because the basis of their power has been, for generations, the fiats issued from the bench.
Obama will search high and low and find someone worse.
I was hoping that old POS would cling on until 2011, when the good guys have liberated enough of congress to reject Zero’s picks. It’s sad that when the RATS make a Supreme court pick it’s always another stinking liberal but when the Republicans pick one it’s a crap shoot.
Scott Brown you are my hero !!!
i agree! Bush 41 gave us Souter and Thomas... exact opposites!
David Souter was the worst. That creep waited to retire so another lib could be appointed. Thanks alot Poppy. You picked a real winner.
Which the liberals no doubt will now forever embrace as as immutable "precedence"...Oh no, my mistake. Its only "precedence" if its a radical alteration of the Constitution in favor of progressive values.
Obama will search high and low and find someone worse.
He’ll have his work cut out for him. This guy should of been long gone by now. He is not nor will he ever be thought of as a giant. he’s a cry baby lib who like them all thinks hes the smarter one in the room. He protects infanticide
When Bork was borked, I’d have gone even more in-your-face conservative.
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