Justice Stevens: "Pretty Darn Conservative"?
The Sincerest Form of Flattery
By Dan McLaughlin Posted in The Courts — Comments (27) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
WSJ Law Blog carries a series of excerpts from a lengthy NY Times Magazine profile ($) of Justice John Paul Stevens, the senior Justice on the Supreme Court and by any commonly used standard the leader of the Court's liberal wing. Some of the key excerpts:
“I don’t think of myself as a liberal at all,” he told me during a recent interview in his chambers, laughing and shaking his head. “I think as part of my general politics, I’m pretty darn conservative.” Stevens said that his views haven’t changed since 1975, when as a moderate Republican he was appointed by President Gerald Ford to the Supreme Court. Stevens’s judicial hero is Potter Stewart, the Republican centrist, whom Stevens has said he admires more than all of the other justices with whom he has served. He considers himself a “judicial conservative,” he said, and only appears liberal today because he has been surrounded by increasingly conservative colleagues.
Read On...
[H]e emphasized that he still thinks of himself as a judicial conservative, which he defined as someone who tries to follow precedents and “who submerges his or her own views of sound policy to respect those decisions by the people who have authority to make them.”
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“Originalism is perfectly sensible. I always try to figure out what the original intent was, but to say that’s the Bible and nothing else counts seems to me quite wrong.”
Up to a point, Justice Stevens is framing his view of the Court's job in terms similar to those commonly used by Justice Scalia or by Chief Justice Roberts to describe their judicial philosophies, and he's self-identifying as a "judicial conservative." Now, you can take this, if you like, as so much disingenuousness in light of his record, but I think it's also a powerful tribute to how far conservatives in general and Justice Scalia in particular have shifted the landscape in how people within and outside of the Court perceive its role and mission that even Justice Stevens finds it desirable that he be perceived as engaging in the same sort of project, and disagreeing mainly at the margins of what constitutes "judicial conservatism." Just as was true when Bill Clinton declared that "the era of big government is over," the moment your opponents start cloaking themselves in your philosophical garb, you know you are winning the battle of ideas. It also means that nostalgia for the old order (H/T) is simply the lament of the losing side in that battle.
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Justice Stevens: "Pretty Darn Conservative"? 27 Comments (0 topical, 27 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
I am just agog at all the ancient, fossilized libs (picturing Lantos also, during the Petraeus hearings) who should have been gone long ago.
Conservative. Heh, good one.
You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
I wonder if the justice actually believes his own words. .
...a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right...
---Thomas Paine---
Along with a bunch of others who claim the same thing as him.
___________________________________
Two thirds of the world is covered by water,
the other third is covered by Champ Bailey.
Anyone who believes something like that is truly sad.
...a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right...
---Thomas Paine---
He thinks that wearing a bowtie and going to bed at 9pm every night makes him a conservative. Let him be.
"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill
In the six flags commercial.
I can probably think of a half-dozen issues off the top of my head where his legal positions have changed since the 1980s, let alone the 70s.
The idea that originalism is somehow an inherently "conservative" idea is bunk. To be sure, on hot button political issues like abortion and gay rights it frequently leads to non-liberal political results, but it doesn't lead to conservative results either (an originalist would equally say the constitution doesn't ban abortion, but rather it is for the legislature to decide).
More importantly, it has historically been used by judicial liberals (such as Justice Black) to justify a host of legal steps that political (and some judicial) conservatives would loathe, such as incorporation.
Justice Hugo Black was a literalist not an originalsit
...a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right...
---Thomas Paine---
More importantly, it has historically been used by judicial liberals (such as Justice Black) to justify a host of legal steps that political (and some judicial) conservatives would loathe, such as incorporation.
As Black himself admitted, incorporation was not strictly textualist, so you've got yourself the wrong example there.
Incorporation was Black's response to Frankfurter's views on substantive due process. Black presumably would have preferred to push incorporation through the 14th Amendment's privileges and immunities clause but, lacking votes to overturn the applicable precedents, offered an alternative to the Frankfurter's Philosopher-King approach. Yes, that's intended to be pejoritive: I have always felt that Black had the better of this particular argument.
I also disagree with the notion, expressed below, that Black was a "literalist." This is something like Copote's criticism of Kerouac ("that's not writing; that's typing"). It's unfair in this instance. Black's approach was always to construe the words of the Constitution as they would be understood by an ordinary citizen; if he sometimes disregarded understandings that could only be reached after extensive legislative study and legal analysis, this was because such would not have been the understanding of the "shopkeep" (in his words).
Of course, like every justice, Black was not always consistent in this approach, but his was more consistent than most.
von
For we have a peculiar power of thinking before we act, and of acting, too, whereas other men are courageous from ignorance but hesitate upon reflection.
both the state and the federal govt are allowed to legislate, if the state law contradicts a federal law, the federal law prevails.
Mike Gamecock DeVine @ The Charlotte Observer
www.race42008.com
www.hinzsightreport.com
www.theminorityreportblog.com
"One man with courage makes a majority" - Andrew Jackson
Do you know anyone that is 87? Would you take their advice on anything? Why do we allow people this old to serve anywhere?
Envisioning when all that is Left is the Right.
If he really believes the bs he was shoveling, he has clearly lost it. He is to the left of Breyer and Breyer worked for Ted Kennedy.
If he's conservative though, I could not imagine who he would consider a moderate or liberal.
that conservative = stupid.
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This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice; ascertained by wise laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions.
-Edmund Burke
Altzheimer's. He's lost it--he should retire.
By the standards of the 1975 Supreme Court, Justice Stevens would be a moderate. It shows how far the Court has come in 40 years
Compared with the four horsemen he'd be a total far lefty nut.
HTML Help Central for Red Staters
Reality: Thompson/Romney Dream: Santorum/Watts.
Not funny enough here.
"People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors." -Edmund Burke
Mike Gamecock DeVine @ The Charlotte Observer
www.race42008.com
www.hinzsightreport.com
www.theminorityreportblog.com
"One man with courage makes a majority" - Andrew Jackson
Stevens: My young Chief Justice, feel the power of the Dark Side. Only through a living Constitution can you have the power of the Presidency without elections!
Roberts: I'll never join you!
HTML Help Central for Red Staters
Reality: Thompson/Romney Dream: Santorum/Watts.
the "life tenure" provision as not applicable to justices named John Paul.
Mike Gamecock DeVine @ The Charlotte Observer
www.race42008.com
www.hinzsightreport.com
www.theminorityreportblog.com
"One man with courage makes a majority" - Andrew Jackson
so hard they still won't have finished laughing in '08 and forget to vote because of it.
Still, I take that tactic any day over MoveOn adds. At least this has some style.
/jest off
By the way, I don't think Stevens has 'lost it'. To suggest he has dementia without some solid proof is rather unbecoming. The man is a leftie, and is probably correct when he says that he hasn't changed his opinion on a thing since 1975. He hasn't lost any marbles - those that are missing he never had. Let's just hope he decides to retire with those he has to a life of golf, fishing or whatever his favorite passtime other than judging is.
The rest of us should get a R elected in 08, basically every candidate in our primary would nominate a judge better than Stevens, and any democrat would nominate a worse one. That's a simple one, for a change.
Maybe the old libs on the court will forget they are libs.
Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country can do for you. Washington Elected Elite
mouth breather".
Envisioning when all that is Left is the Right.
I read the whole article, and found it quite interesting to see just how devoid of logical thinking and reasoning this person really is. I saw where Ed Whelan did an excellent job of pointing out some of his other contradictory and ridiculous claims at http://bench.nationalreview.com/
Some of those addressed are:
Stevens on the political process:
"'It seems to me that one of the overriding principles in running the country is the government ought to be neutral,' Stevens told me. 'It has a very strong obligation to be impartial, and not use its power to advance political agendas or personal agendas.'"
In politics, we shouldn't advance political agendas? Huh? He has the roles of the judiciary and the legislature reversed.
Stevens on race:
"The notion that judges should treat all racial classifications alike, he told me, 'doesn’t make any sense.'"
The segregationists and slaveowners felt the same way.
Stevens on abortion:
"'I think the less judges have to decide the better, and I frankly look at who should decide this,' he told me."
Too bad he doesn't act on what he thinks is better. I wonder if he intended to conclude that sentence with NARAL's motto.
i cannot print here what I think of this guy.
"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle