No, I’m not saying all Supreme Court Justices are liberals. I merely note that Supreme Court Justices OFTEN turn out to be far more liberal than expected, and that conservative Republican Presidents often find, to their chagrin, that the seemingly conservative judges they appointed have evolved into pinkoes, once on the Supreme Court.
Examples abound: Earl Warren, William Brennan, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter.
Democrats, on the other hand, are almost NEVER disappointed by their Supreme Court nominees. Indeed, you’d have to go all the way back to Felix Frankfurter to find a justice who proved more CONSERVATIVE than expected! Breyer and Ginsburg sure didn’t turn anti-abortion on the Court, and none of LBJ’s nominees veered rightward.
I have my own theory, and I’ll offer it later, but first I’d like to hear yours. Offer some theories to explain this. Why is it that, when Supreme COurt Justices change their minds, they always shift to the left?
One. The demos tend to appont generally conservative justices. Two. They shift “left” because they are making decisions based on the constitution, and that is what the constitution mandates. Also, barring the “shifts to the left” many descisions by the supreme court are quite conservative.
Oldscratch is right. The court oftens swings rightward and not leftward. But your question is flawed. Who says the republicans are suprised? How do you define “move left?”
Because the main principal of liberals is that the end justifies the means. Liberal candidates feign centrist beliefs to get appointed, and then don’t have to face re-election. - MC
As I understand it, most Supreme Court Justices undergo a little bit of scrutinization before their appointment is approved. Most Justices were somewhat public figures before their appointment. Both parties have a real bitch of a time getting their candidates approved because of the importance of the position. Are you trying to say that the Justices in question are really closet liberals who hide this for the x amount of years their careers go on before their Supreme Court appointment, and then they suddenly change colors like some deep cover mole once they are appointed? (sorry about the run on sentence) Just asking for clarification.
I believe that Anthony Kennedy shifted his vote on the last abortion rights vote (the intact D&E vote) rightwards. He was pro-choice, and he voted for the ban.
This is why many liberals who would contemplate voting for Nader this election are voting for Gore. I’d vote for Nader if I didn’t have to live with the prospect of 20 years of a conservative court.
Yea, they (liberal judges) spend the first 25-30 years of their careers makeing conservative judgements, because they are hoping to be appointed to the supreme court by a conservative president. Then they can get to work setting their liberal agenda.
Astorian,
I would like some examples of justices switching their positions upon reaching the supreme court.
Because being liberal is the right thing to do. Once in a position of great power without politics to answer for, the justices do the morally right thing to do, which is to lean to the left.
I’d say the reason is stare decisis. Conservative justices are unlikely to find “new rules” hidden in the constitution, but are, by the same token, reluctant to overturn those that prior liberal courts already did. So by and large, the weight of those early, liberal decisions tend come down even on conservative judges.
Within the last 40 years, we have only had 6 years where there was both a Republican President and Republican control of the Senate, and 14 where there was a Republican President but Democratic control of the Senate.
Therefore, when choosing a SC Justice, most Republican Presidents have tried to choose one with some liberal or moderate viewpoints in order to ensure passage- remember the fallout from Bork or from Nixon’s first appointee (Caswell, IIRC)?
Conversely, of the last 40 years, we have had 14 years where there was both a Democratic President and Democratic control of the Senate, and only 6 where there was a Democratic President but Republican control of the Senate. (Weirdly symmetrical, huh?)
Therefore, when choosing a SC Justice, most Democratic Presidents have not needed to choose a candidate who would mollify the Republicans in the Senate.
So most ‘liberal’ Justices could be strongly liberal; but most ‘conservative’ Justices would have strong moderate or liberal tendencies.
I’m surprised that nobody’s mentioned Whizzer White, appointed to the Court by Kennedy, and a solidly conservative member of the court for decades. He decidedly shifted rightward over the years.
I’d debate whether Anthony Kennedy has changed his stripes noticably, and Souter and O’Connor are centrists only by the standard of the current (very conservative) Court; they’re still basically conservative, IMO.
Who do we have on the current Court?
Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas - very conservative when appointed; haven’t changed.
Kennedy - conservative when appointed; still there. O’Connor, Souter - moderately conservative when appointed; haven’t changed much.
Ginsburg, Breyer - moderately liberal when appointed; still there.
Stevens - moderately conservative when appointed (by Ford, IIRC), moved distinctly to the left.
I’d say it’s been a long time since anyone changed all that much on the Supreme Court. It may have been a function of the times.
I admired Whizzer White, but he didn’t move to the right at all- rather, he epitomized what was considered the mainstream of the Democratic Party in 1960. The Democrats have shifted so far left in the meantime, that White SEEMED to have moved rightward.
In reality, the positions White espoused at the end of his term are exactly the ones JFK espoused in 1961.
RTF, I generally agree with you with one noticable exception. O’Connor is too much of a minimalist to have a political “platform” on the court. She decides every case on it’s individual merits. Her favorite phrase?
“Today, the Court only decides the merits of this case. We do not create a guiding rule for the country to follow. In this case, the statute . . . is held to be constitutional/unconstitutional.”
No one can predict her opinions and votes anywhere near as effectively as Scalia’s opinions and votes. The only thing we know for sure is that O’Connor is not going to vote for a wide spread all-encompassing plan without extreme justification. She even waivered a bit on the strength of Roe in Webster. She specifically did not overturn Roe, but she also decided Webster on the issue of viability.
She and Kennedy are the swing votes in the Court for every issue. Quite a bit of power when you think about it.
In O’Connor’s concurring opinion in the NE partial abortion law ban, she argued that if the law had included less absolute language, she would have voted to uphold it. The decision was 5-4.
Souter has been a complete disappointment to conservatives. By and large he is part of the Ginsburg-Breyer bloc. Every right wing group in the country has been begging W not to appoint another Souter.
I believe the point taken above by labdude. No federal judge wants his/her decisions overturned. Consequently judges tend to support a less activist agenda. No one really knows how someone will react when placed in a permanent position of extreme power without any real prospect of removal. I thank George Bush every morning for having appointed David Souter to the court.
John Corrado’s analysis is pretty good, I think. John, how would you explain the fact that Scalia, under a Republican president, was confirmed 98-0? It doesn’t look like the Democrats needed to be mollified. More likely they just didn’t know what a constructionist Scalia would turn out to be.
I think Souter’s left turn is the result of the confirmation difficulties of other Republican nominees. The Repubs deliberately picked someone with as small of a footprint as possible, in order to give the Demos less amunition to work with. Unfortunately, this backfired, as Souter turned out to have been much more liberal than was projected.
That nomination was in '82, IIRC, which is both before I reached political conciousness, and after most of the texts I’ve read, so I’ve really no clue whatsoever.
However, as a WAG, I’ll throw out these factors.
In '82, Reagan and the Republican party were still riding an immense wave of popularity, and people felt that there had been a true ground-shift in America’s priorities. According to Tip O’Neil’s “Man of the House”, a lot of Democrats at that time were perfectly happy to surrender to Reagan’s agenda because they worried that being seen as an obstruction to Reagan would guarantee their losing the next election.
Also according to Tip O’Neil, Reagan was a master horse-trader; so what small fanatic opposition (fanatic in the sense of “willing to vote against it even though it’s guaranteed to not matter”) there was might well have been mollified through Reagan’s willingness to do photo ops or add a little pork into the next budget.
Finally, remember that there were still some Southern Democrats who more closely adhered to Republican principles (a trend which I think died in '94, at which point most of them finally decided to switch over); so the Senate majority of 57 Republicans was actually pretty close to a 60 vote fillibuster-breaker when it came down to it, so even organized opposition wouldn’t have been able to stop the nomination.
To sum up, I guess it comes down to- you can’t stop Scalia; even trying to stop Scalia might get your constituents pissed off; why not just go with the flow, make it look like you’re standing proud for a unified America, and get a little pork in return? Then, should Scalia turn rabid right wing, you can still blame the Republicans for nominating him in the first place. A win-win situation.
Conversely, Bork had to try to get through a Democratic Senate, at a time when the Democrats were starting to feel like they could flex their muscles again.
Scalia 'twas 1986, part and parcel with Rehnquist’s ascension to Chief Justiceship. The margin can be attributed to the Democrats focusing their energy on Rehnquist’s confirmation.
Which Clinton appointees, in your view, are “strongly liberal?” I’d argue that Souter’s the furthest to the left of anyone on the bench–certainly more so than luke-warm centrists Ginsburg and Breyer–for reasons which, oddly enough, IzzyR described pretty well.
I’d second the recommendation of Closed Chambers as a great book about the current Court. Marshall, Brennan, and Blackmun, we miss you–on the bench right now sit three conservative firebrands (Rehnquist, Scalia, shudder Thomas) with no counterparts, any longer, on the left.
