Judges are not supposed to be deferential to the popular will. The ideal is impartial and independent.
Let’s get something straight then - Democrats in the Senate have been FAR more partisan on Supreme Court judges than have Republicans.
For example, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who was a very liberal candidate in her day, only got 3 no votes from Republicans. Justice Thomas from the same era had 46 votes against him. And of course Robert Bork was met with such hostility that he had to withdraw. Stephen Breyer had only 9 ‘nay’ votes from Republicans. Alito had 40 nay votes from Democrats, while SotoMayor had 31 from Republicans. John Roberts even had 22 nay votes from Democrats, and no one could identify a thing wrong with him other than that he was slightly to the right. Kagan had 36 nay votes from Republicans, while Gorsuch had 43 nay votes from Democrats. All of these judges were qualified and had outstanding records, which is all that’s supposed to matter. And of course, Kavanaugh was subject to the kind of smear campaign we haven’t seen since Bork, and 48 Democrats voted against him.
LOL!
Garland. Not to mention the entirely reasonable scrutiny faced by Thomas and Kavanaugh, based on the credible allegations made against them.
What a joke. It’s hard to believe that anyone actually finds this plausible. At best, this is a demonstration of the entirely different universes we live in.
And Souter, also from that era, only had 9 votes against him. Only if there was something that came up during Thomas’s nomination hearing that would have caused people to vote against him. I haven’t the faintest idea what that could have been
No, he’s right. Garland had no votes at all against him.
Let’s not forget that the Whig Party hasn’t voted against a justice in over a hundred years. Clearly they are the most bipartisan party.
Sam Stone has a point though. Ginsburg and Roberts were both scandal-free nominees and yet the former only got 3 Republican “no” votes while the latter had 22 Democratic “no” votes. So, even leaving Thomas and Kavanaugh aside, there is indeed a clear trend of evidence that Democrats vote more along the lines of ideology than Republicans do. You could be a scandal-free, clean conservative nominee for SCOTUS and there would still be Democratic Senators who would vote against you because you are…conservative. (Namely, because you would represent a legal threat to Roe, etc.)
Namely because of Garland.
Roberts’ confirmation was in 2005, well before Garland was ever an issue.
No justice ever nominated by a Republican will ever be a threat to Roe v. Wade. Not overturning Roe is the Republicans’ #1 criterion for a judge, because if they ever delivered on that, they wouldn’t be able to us it to rally people to vote for corporatist candidates.
I don’t think that’s correct. For your consideration, in 2008 the RKBA activists finally got what they’ve wanted for a long time: a Supreme Court ruling declaring that the 2nd Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. But the issue didn’t lose any potency. It’s not like both sides said, “well, that settles it, I guess we’re done here”. The fight just shifted to other areas. The same thing would happen if SCOTUS overturned Roe v Wade. It’s not like the pro-life and pro-choice sides would then just call it a day and pack it in. It would still be an issue that drives fervent political involvement from both sides.
I don’t know why people still think this. Abortion is but one out of a hundred things that motivates conservatives and the right wing. Overturning *Roe *would still leave 99 other things for conservatives to clamor for (plus, overturning *Roe *hardly means the abortion war is won; it simply sends things down to the state level.)
This would be like saying, pre-2015, “Liberals would never want a SCOTUS justice who would actually vote in favor of gay marriage. Because if you pass gay marriage and satisfy the LGBT faction, suddenly there’s nothing left for liberals to rally around.”
The difference is that gay marriage is something that liberal politicians actually want. It’s an end, not a means to an end. The Republican position is always to help the rich get richer, and then claim whatever else they need to build a majority.
Comparing individual Supreme Court justices is a problem because a lot has changed about partisan politics decade-by-decade. Similarly, when you have a sample size of six, it is hard to make meaningful comparisons because the individuals are very different. Thomas and Kavanaugh had genuine problems, apart from ideology.
A far better test of this theory that Democrats are more ideological as to judges would be to look at Court of Appeals nominations instead of the far less frequent and more noisy Supreme Court nominations. What do you think that test shows?
Conservative media has been far more obsessed with judicial nominations than liberal media. A typical Hannity-watcher knows who Michael Luttig is. Few Maddow-watchers know who Goodwin Liu is. So I suspect that many conservatives have some degree of confirmation bias about which party is fighting tooth-and-nail to control the courts.
From the super die hard Trumpy fan people I talk to, I would agree with this assessment. The people that I know that voted Trump because they felt screwed and wanted someone to shake up the government, they don’t care about the courts or know anyone on the Supreme Court. Those seem to be the two different sets of Trump supporters that I encounter in my daily life. The first kind still like him and are happy, the second kind range from mild regret for voting for him to “feeling screwed by another rich asshole.”
The court watching Trump folks seem to think that “their guys” on the court are going to take away Roe or keep gun laws loose. That seems to be what they care about as far as I can tell. They don’t show much interest about the Citizens United case or religious exemptions or anything else. The second group of Trump voters that I encounter don’t really seem to care about the court picks one way or the other.
I suspect that dichotemy is true on the left as well. Few people are highly ideological. That’s why I referred to people who watch cable news. They tend to be among the ideological minority. Normal people watch sitcoms.
But as Velocity pointed out, it is not an end. The gay rights groups didn’t fold and take up gardening or coin collecting. They are still out there fighting for the right to public accommodations and adding sexual orientation to anti-discrimination laws and are a strong ally in the fight for transgender rights. The fight continues.
Likewise if Roe is overturned, that’s not the end of the game. There will be battles in statehouses all across the country, and they will be meaningful ones. It is easy for a politician to pander to his base by voting for an abortion ban after 6 weeks of pregnancy because he gets to show off his pro-life cred and also be secure in the knowledge that the law will be stayed about 11 seconds after a federal court sees it. He can play both sides.
And not just in statehouses. If the Dems control both houses of Congress and the presidency, there could be a Lawful Commerce in Abortions Act which supersedes state law by disallowing local interference with a federal policy of legal abortion. Is that constitutional? The same groups will still be there and not collecting coins.
A repeal of Roe would have consequences neither side is talking about. It would give the Democrats a new national issue, to fight for national abortion rights again. They would portray it as a huge injustice to women and rev up the base. In the meantime, a lot of Republican political energy and money would shift to the various states because that is where abortion laws could then be changed. I suspect this would have large, and pretty much unknowable effects to the political landscape.
I actually don’t think either side really wants a change. Roe is useful to Republicans because the law was decided poorly, giving them an endless issue to campaign on. They have a plausible mechanism for overturning a law their base hates, and so can raise money and support for it. Roe makes abortion a federal issue, which benefits federal candidates. Without Roe, abortion becomes a state issue and federal Republicans lose the ability to campaign on it.