Well, for one there have not been any hardcore liberal justices that have breezed through the Senate. As with so much else in this world, just because someone is to the left of Clarence Thomas does not equal that they are hardcore liberal.
Thurgood Marshall was hardcore liberal from the getgo, and he was confirmed 69-11. More recently, Ginsberg is solidly liberal, and passed 96-3, and Breyer, also solidly liberal, passed 87-9.
Logic, evidence and precedent?
One would hope he is on the side of the Constitution. What side are you on?
Republican POTUSes have historically appointed less qualified* judges. Not just to SCOTUS, but to the federal circuits too. That makes it harder for them to get confirmed, so those POTUSes later appoint moderates to split the opposition. Witness the Harriet Meiers debacle before Roberts’ appointment, for example.
*according to the ABA. Conservatives have been saying the ABA is biased for some time, and the Bush II Administration was the first to reject their recommendations.
True.
Oddly, though, it doesn’t seem to stop people from calling me a partisan hack who bases his support on the desired outcome and not the law.
I wish more folks could see (or admit) what you’ve said here.
Dems are soulless. Their religion is social justice. They believe the end justifies the means.
So you’re saying that reality DOES have a liberal bias, furt?
furt. heh.
I guess I don’t see how one follows the other. Are you saying that the best result isn’t the one that produces the most happiness? What would be a better course to follow?
Why should I be concerned about relying on any Supreme Court justice? As long as the decision has a solid basis in law I’m OK with it. When it comes to legal matters there should be no “side”.
Naive? Perhaps. With few exceptions (Kelo, notably) I have been OK with Supreme Court decisions in my lifetime. And even the ones I disagreed with were fairly well reasoned decisions.
This would have made a better argument if you’d explicitly excluded Roberts from discussion, as he’s a staunch conservative who nonetheless (occasionally at least) puts principles over politics, and thus didn’t engage in an unprincipled vote against a perfectly constitutional law, the way the court’s other conservative justices did. That, at least, is what GOP leaders claim to want in a Supreme Court justice.
And you might be able to make a case that GOP presidents have tended to pick justices who became more liberal, I suppose, but it’s hard to say that about anyone presently on the court, with the occasional exception of Kennedy. Scalia, Alito, and Thomas certainly never betray their partisanship.
[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
Well, a hardcore predictable republican/conservative wouldn’t get past the senate, ref: Robert Bork.
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Unless they were Scalia, Alito, and Thomas, the latter of whom doesn’t even pretend to engage in any kind of legal reasoning to support his votes. I doubt there will ever be a liberal justice who gets nominated after earning the track record Thomas did at nomination.
I would say so. Surely you know how easily a legal argument can be made for either side in a case so far from cut and dried that it even reaches the court. A lawyer of enough skill to reach that level as a judge has no trouble at all fitting a superficially-reasonable-seeming legal argument under a conclusion he already wants to reach.
You say there should be no “side” in legal matters? Does that mean you have faith that the process of legal reasoning should always reach one particular conclusion in any case under consideration? Can you really mean that or anything like that?
Someone correct me if I’m wrong - as if I had to give that instruction to people on this board - but wasn’t the phase “Reality has a liberal bias” originated by noted mock conservative pundit Stephen Colbert?
I didn’t realize that that quip had risen to (or sunk to ) the level of canard yet.
Yes. The full quote was “reality has a well known liberal bias,” and I think he first said it while mocking Bush before the White House Press Corps.
I’m saying that’s why Dems are reliable, especially on social issues. Nobody ever speculates about how the liberal four vote.
I meant in the context of politics. In every court proceeding there are opposing viewpoints and someone has to lose. I no longer choose to look at the result as a loss for the right or left wing. To be frank, I like the way today turned out and would probably be somewhat annoyed had it gone the other way, but I’m neither going nuts or high-filing people over it. My beliefs won, not my “side”.
No matter how many times people say this, it’s still wrong. Not every Supreme Court case goes 5-4 with Kennedy as the swing vote.
There was a different source that came with a very similar retort against the people that do want to be grounded in reality and not dogma, I think that was what inspired Colbert:
Wrong “Daily Show” staffer - it was Rob Corddry.
The qualifier was “especially social issues”. Let’s face it, those are the cases usually reported. The news media knows what cases would be a snore-fest and which ones people can relate to.