Not to mention that being a Supreme Court Justice doesn’t pay as well as being an ex-President on the lecture circuit, and it takes a lot more work.
Tough question, because it’s more complicated than just asking “Which justice votes (or voted) the way I would?”
As a conservative, I suppose I’m expected to like Antonin Scalia… but I regard him as a very disappointing justice. NOT because of the way he votes- I’m perfectly happy with that. But because he’s ONLY one vote for my side, and that just isn’t enough. When you’re serving on a court populated by liberals, conservatives and moderates, you CAN’T achive greatness just by writing scathing, witty dissents! You have to be a diplomat. You have to be able to charm, coax, persuade, and win over people to your side.
To give the devil his due, WIlliam Brennan (whom I absolutely loathed) was a brilliant justice. As I’ve said before, if liberals had a choice between a Court of 5 William Rehnquists and 4 Thurgood Marshalls or a Court of 8 Rehnquists and 1 WiIlliam Brennan, the liberals should oipt for the Court with Brennan. Because the Court with 4 Marshalls would ALWAYS vote 5-4 for the conservative side, whereas William Brennan was charming, diplomatic and persuasive enough to piece together a 5-4 majority for the liberal side every once in a while. Thurgood Marshall had no charm, no intellect, no diplomatic skills, no powers of persuasion. Like Scalia, he was a reliable vote for his side, but nothing more.
If Antonin Scalia wanted to help his cause, he’d have spent his time trying to charm Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor. Instead, by being obstinate and tactless, he often drove them (I believe) farther left than they actually wanted to go.
A good justice votes the way I’d vote. But a GREAT justice has to influence the others.
Right, it was Taft’s dream to serve on the court, and fellow Ohioan Warren Harding made that possible, with Senate confirmation of course.
Depends on how narrowly one wishes to define “qualified”. If you’re referring only to mastery of detailed technicalities that only a cloistered, isolated “reader of the law” can develop over a career, then maybe not. But that isn’t what the SC is mainly about, and to the extent it is, that’s what clerks are for.
If you instead recognize that the Court’s role is a political one, that it does make law with almost every ruling, that it does have an obligation to align its rulings with the cause of justice to the full extent they can see it, that it has an obligation therefore to recognize the effects its rulings and how it comes about them have on the real world and real people’s lives, then it isn’t so clear Taft was underqualified. He wasn’t just a fat guy with a funny mustache, he was a masterful politician, who knew how people worked (and how they could be manipulated). The skills a good Justice needs, as I’ve started to list them, are *political *ones, in short.
Eisenhower used similar reasoning in selecting Gov. Warren as CJ. The primary historical effect was that Warren used his political skills not only in recognizing how *Brown *needed to be decided, but that it had to be unanimous, and in his behind-the-scenes work to make it unanimous. If that had been a 5-4 vote delivered on narrow, technical grounds, wouldn’t it have been as much an impedance as a help to the civil rights movement, and wouldn’t we be worse off for it today? And Reagan picked O’Connor in part for her experience as an elected legislator, for similar reasons.
No, I can’t point to any comparable cases under the Taft court, sorry, but the principle is there.
Favorite is of course Taft: My law school’s “mascot”, jurist, President, bedeviled by bathtubs, a truly historic mustache.
Modern: while I often disagree with him, I respect Thomas a great deal. When he dissents separately, its often worth reading. Scalia, depnding on the case, is either hilarious or infuriating. Favorite may be Souter, O’Connor, or Sotomayor.
I’d love to go to the opera with Scalia and Ginsburg.
Bonus least favorite: Kennedy.
Oh, gosh yes. I would pay good money to do that. I mean, money in addition to the ticket to the opera, which I assume costs like $1 bazillion. (I don’t go to the opera very often.)
Why do you not like Kennedy?
Sees himself too much as a philosopher-king?
Thomas. I like his attitude of “I don’t care if we’ve gotten it wrong for the past 125 years. It’s time to get it right instead of continuing to be wrong.” He’s seen as an intellectual lightweight because he has such a straightforward and simplistic view of things, but his resume shows that he is definitely not a stupid man.
It helps that I think there is only 2 major cases (this week’s DNA case being 1) in which I have disagreed with him.
Scalia comes in a close 2nd, but many times he lets his own right wing personal opinions cloud his judgment.
As far as those I disagree with, I admire Breyer for his consistent and well stated views.
I think Roberts is a media whore who is concerned about how history will see the “Roberts Court.” If you aren’t a conservative, you should hate him and Alito worse than Scalia on any day of the week because they both seem to be right wing down the line with no regard for personal freedoms. But you should hate Roberts worse because he is just for John Roberts (even though he pulled your feet out of the fire on Obamacare).
I have noticed that most if not all of the supreme court justices are analytical and as you well know all analytical people seem to have the same problem …
They are either right or wrong lol
I like/liked Sandra Day O’Conner … good looking Irish/Texan and a Christian even though she is technically not a real texan being from El Paso lol
Hey! This is just about what we think and not really a debate, right?
As for Justice Roberts I think he will become one of the best on the court when history is history … He came through with the truth that the Obama healthcare law was really in effect a tax …
He was right and in turn saved President Obama’s job …
Do I like President Obama … “no”
Do I like the new healthcare law still being decided if it should go into effect January 2014… “no”
But my God does not lose elections … and the choices were very bad
Our country is such a big change right now … we need them to be right on
I agree with the latter part. Witness, for example, Moreno, in which Brennan managed to assemble a 7-2 majority striking down a modern federal statute on substantive due process grounds. But, if we’re to consider historical justices, which the OP disclaims, my choice would be John Marshall Harlan II. Agree or disagree with his decisions, he was to my mind the best writer the Court has ever seen.
Interestingly enough, in regards to Obama being a SCOTUS justice:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-06/why-obama-keeps-losing-at-the-supreme-court.html
n cases before the Supreme Court last year, President Barack Obama’s Justice Department relied on outlandish legal theories that pushed a constitutional interpretation of extreme federal power. That posture led to unanimous losses in three very different areas of law: religious liberty (Hosanna-Tabor Church v. EEOC), criminal procedure (U.S. v. Jones) and property rights (Sackett v. EPA).
You’d expect someone with his credentials to do better, or at least LOOK like his administration is making good arguments and just getting abused by a conservative majority. But instead, he gets slapped down unanimously and his Solicitor General is made to look like a fool.
Interestingly enough, in regards to Obama being a SCOTUS justice:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-06/why-obama-keeps-losing-at-the-supreme-court.html
n cases before the Supreme Court last year, President Barack Obama’s Justice Department relied on outlandish legal theories that pushed a constitutional interpretation of extreme federal power. That posture led to unanimous losses in three very different areas of law: religious liberty (Hosanna-Tabor Church v. EEOC), criminal procedure (U.S. v. Jones) and property rights (Sackett v. EPA).
You’d expect someone with his credentials to do better, or at least LOOK like his administration is making good arguments and just getting abused by a conservative majority. But instead, he gets slapped down unanimously and his Solicitor General is made to look like a fool.
And there’s more in there than just the three. This administration gets struck down unanimously a lot, and has made incredible arguments about expansive executive branch authority that John Ashcroft, GWB, and DIck Cheney wouldn’t have dreamed of making.
Yeah, the problem with this is that it can cause whiplash. On 5-4 decisions, you could have conflicting opinions issued every time the Court changes “hands”. That kind of unsettled landscape isn’t really good for anybody. A nation of 300M people and an economy the size of ours requires stability and reasonable expectations based on prior knowledge. Stare decisis provides that stability and shouldn’t be ignored willy-nilly, but only in key cases where it’s obvious that the landscape has well and truly changed.
I think that argument has merit, but there are extreme cases where stare decisis just blatantly conflicts with the Constitution. Precedent should be respected when it comes to interpreting law, or where the Constitution is unclear, but in clearcut cases I just don’t see how it should be binding.
And I think it’s important to remember that the New Deal court and the Warren court overturned mountains of precedent. There shouldn’t be an arbitrary cutoff where precedent should now be binding just because liberals locked in a lot of changes that they wanted.
That being said, I wouldn’t advocate “whiplashing” where current laws that Americans are used to would be overturned, such as deciding that Social Security is now unconstitutional, or that suspects don’t have Miranda rights. However, I have no problem with justices restricting the scope of the commerce clause where Congress tries to pass new laws that push that particular envelope.
What is your definition of “clearcut”, because Thomas has one that is a tad bit troubling. His view of stare decisis is extreme and he’d undo a great deal of legal precedent of the last 200 years. And the whole time, he’d tell you his opinion (one not shared by even a slight majority) is “clear cut”. His willingness to overturn caselaw that has stood (and been upheld by many different courts) is one of the most troubling aspects of his judicial philosophy. His view is one of the most activist the court has ever seen.
The problem here is that the Constitution is unclear (or deliberately vague) in LOTS of areas. What is “an establishment” of religion? What is a “well-regulated militia” and what does that famous comma mean? These things all have to be interpreted. There is no clear cut conflict. Unless of course a prior Court decision said something silly like “Of course the Government may establish a religion.” That would be a clear conflict, but most are far from that easy.
Yeah I know and I suspect that if I had been alive back then I would have liked the outcome but worried about the process. However, in some of those cases, the landscape had clearly changed and the Court reacted IMHO appropriately.
And, much like SSM, it may be that the landscape is changing with regard to an unrestricted commerce clause. In which case, a modification (or even reversal) of existing precedent is maybe called for (note that this should not be taken as my arguing the actual point one way or the other - but you certainly do seem to hear a lot more discussion about the CC and Fed/State relationship these days).
I’ll agree that he’s activist, but I’ve never seen an opinion of his that was troubling in that fashion. My only criticism of Thomas is that he’s got a bug up his ass about homosexuality and made a terrible decision in Lawrence v. Texas.
Definitely, not it’s crystal clear in others. For example, the 1st amendment says, “Congress shall pass no law”. While the courts have indeed allowed restrictions of various sorts anyway, I have no problem with a justice who resolutely refuses to compromise on that point, precedent be damned, because that’s what the Constitution says.
I think some of the precedent overturned by those courts was bad precedent. In regards to the commerce clause, the pre-New Deal court pretty much denied that Congress has ANY power to regulate the economy, and that’s just as wrong as saying that Congress has unlimited power to regulate the economy.
You’re untroubled by his belief that the Establishment Clause does not apply to the states? Or that the entirety of substantive due process needs to be overruled? Or that the federal government should have nothing to do with desegregation?
I’m not familiar with any of his rulings or statements in that regard.