Put retired in the thread title, dammit! Last thing anyone needs is another Trump appointed SCOTUS right now (I mean it’s gonna happen but longer it’s delayed the better)
Though on the bright side someone is explaining to a mid-tantrum Trump why he doesn’t get to appoint a SCOTUS just because this one just died 
Thank you for that. It doesn’t really change my opinion. She did the country a major disservice in the end. Her reasoning wasn’t great. She was holding out hope the Dems took the Senate & the Presidency, she also didn’t retire despite serious health issues.
At least under Obama, the pick would have better than what we got.
Excellent point!! Done!!
I just don’t think we can assume that to be true, given the truly desperate and awful lengths to which McConnell went to neuter Merrick Garland’s nomination by refusing to even have an up-or-down vote. That, in my opinion, is when people in this country should have been truly outraged and understood that the process was tainted and politicized beyond redemption.
I am surprised that Trump/MAGA hasn’t been putting intense pressure on Thomas and Alito to retire right now. Or maybe they have, but we have heard nothing publicly of it. It would be ironic indeed if Clarence Thomas ends up RBG-ing the Republicans a few years after RBG RBG’d the Democrats.
I don’t know. Thomas strikes me as the type of person likely to stick around until the bitter end just to spite his enemies. Certainly, he would prefer that a Republican president appoint his replacement, but deep down, I can’t imagine he really all that much gives a shit. Keep in mind, this is a guy who sold himself out to the highest bidder. And once he leaves the bench, he’s no longer useful to the Harlan Crows of the world, and I doubt he’s eager to give up those free vacations and sweet, sweet largesse.
Leaving the bench would also make it easier for a Democratic AG in the future to go after him on corruption charges.
Souter really changed the way that Supreme Court Justices are selected.
When he was nominated, he wasn’t an ideologue with a long judicial track record, and most of the opposition to his nomination came from the far left. One reason for his nomination was because he would be a “stealthy candidate” who could sail through the process without the acrimony of Bork a couple years earlier. Conservatives were supporting his nomination because they thought he might be the key vote to overtuning Roe and other liberal decisions from the court’s previous decades.
Keep in mind that when he was nominated, Republicans had held the presidency for twenty years, save only for the one term of Jimmy Carter, who made no Supreme Court appointments during his time in office. So an entire generation of Republican appointments - while somewhat counterbalanced by the fact that the party still had a moderate and even liberal wing for much of that time - would finally be able to do the judicial rewriting that the conservative movement was looking for.
But Souter, on the court, moved progressively to the left in his opinions, to the point that “No More Souters!” became a rallying cry among the conservative movement. The backlash was palpable. Membership in the Federalist Society became the litmus test for conservatives, and it became expected that a wave of dark money would be deployed to get new, ideologically vetted candidates through the confirmation process by the thinnest of margins,
In the end, Souter retired under Obama’s presidency, sealing once and for all the enmity of the conservative movement. But in many ways, Souter created an imbalance of intensity in how the different political wings see the Court. Those who see the makeup of the Court as important broke 56-41 for Trump in 2016, and it may have gone even higher in 2024 (I haven’t seen the polling). Now that the conservative skew of the court is virtually guaranteed for a generation or longer, will the left be able to gird itself for the long, slow grind of wresting control of the court back from Leo-selected ideologues?
This is a great post, IMHO, and it comports with my recollections of how we got to our current state of affairs.
The only thing I would add is the persistent myth that it was Democrats who denied Bork his seat, when in fact, it was Republicans who chose to vote against him. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard venomous assertions from right-leaning people “explaining” to me how this is all revenge for what Democrats did to Bork. It’s a total misrepresentation of what in fact happened.
I am not hopeful. The only tiny glimmer I see is that the mask is dislodged on the “balls and strikes” narrative. The ugly partisanship is now in full view, and it is scaring a lot of people.
Thanks again for your insightful post!
This doesn’t jibe with this excellent documentary about why the court has gone the way it has, thanks to a young Mitch McConnell smarting from the Bork hijinx:
McTurtle spearheaded the whole Federalist Society thing that strongly guides Republican nominations today. While a few Republicans defected on the Bork vote, Democrats do bear responsibility for damaging the nomination in the court of public opinion. Mitch stays alive today mainly to bask in the glory of the court he helped curate, which is rooted in the Bork nomination (according to the documentary).
I have not yet watched your referenced documentary, but:
I’d say Bork did that to himself, considering his role in the Nixon Saturday Night Massacre. I don’t believe it was reasonable for anyone to expect any Dem to support the SCOTUS nomination for Bork after that.
And yet, according to the Wikipedia article on him two Democrats voted for Bork, while 6 Republicans voted against. Of course that was during a quaint time in our history when the now extinct “Liberal Republican” and “Conservative Democrat” existed.
@SunUp , thanks for that excellent post on Souter adding more color to why the court nomination and selection process is politicized the way it is.
Thanks. As your post points out, we’ve had a sorting of the parties on ideological lines, and it was inevitable that at some point that sorting would happen to the judicial branch as well. In many ways, the existence of the Federalist Society is intended to keep in line judges and justices that might have otherwise succumbed to the tendency to move left in their opinions, typified by Souter but observed in many other justices before him (and since; Kennedy and (to a lesser extent recently) Barrett have both disappointed conservatives with their rulings).
But I think we all lose if maintaining ideological conformity is valued over having an open mind, attention to detail, and flexibility and humility in applying the law to new situations.