Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, the judge with the second-longest tenure on the highest court, has died at a hospital in Florida at the age of 99.
I’m sure in response Trump will try and nominate another SC justice…
McConnell will put it forward.
The Media will collectively shrug “IOKIYAR”
The house will issue a sternly worded letter bogged down with a history lesson that bores anyone who reads it to tears. Then make a big show of it in the floor which then turns attention on Trump response.
Them well move onto the next travesty
I’m not sure that it’s correct or fair to state that he went from being a Repub to being a liberal. The two weren’t always mutually exclusive and back when he was first put on the court there were quite a few liberal Repubs, like Lindsay, Weicker, Javits, etc. I don’t know if he remained a Repub, but I think that he was always a liberal, by today’s standards at least, with a more “liberal” view of the constitution than most of his Repub contemporaries. Even Nixon and Ford were “liberal” compared to today’s Repubs.
In any case, he was a fantastic jurist and decent man and will be missed.
Frankly I believe he was relatively conservative always, in the true meaning of the word.
It’s simply that “conservative” these days is better defined as “Radical”
Or Racist.
Or Reprehensible.
Or Rotten to the Core.
Or…
Hang in there RBG!!!
Here was a man who was nominated and appointed to the Court, not because of his politics but for his keen legal mind and sense of justice. Now look at the buffoons we are stuck with; Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. (I still have some hopes for Roberts, but only a little.) Something really has to change and I think we start by removing lifetime appointments to the Federal Courts. Naturally, the first thing we have to do is remove the Current Occupant from the White House, but I fear that will not happen until January, 2021.
Liberal and conservative aren’t mutually exclusive, as I see it. It really depends on what you’re referring to (and whether you’re being honest about it). E.g. Hamilton was a “conservative”, but “liberal” in trying to extend liberty and opportunity to all. Complicating things further are the classical vs. modern meaning of liberal, the former mostly being about economic policy while the latter is more about social policy.
But, without getting into a long-winded treatise on definitions, I’d say that he was a “liberal”-minded jurist in having a broad definition of how to apply the constitution to modern realities, but was “conservative” in how he crafted his rulings to fit his outlook.
E.g. when the 14th Amendment says “equal protection”, it really means equal, not more equal for some than others. But to win over those who might not see it that way, he was careful and methodical in his reasoning, i.e. “conservative”.
In the end it’s just semantics, though, and you’re either a tight-assed protector of class, race and gender privilege, which is what conservative basically means these days, or you’re looking to apply and thus extend the core principles of the constitution to everyone, meaning not just liberty but justice and the “common good”, in which case you’re a liberal.
In that sense, he was a liberal.
Funny “fear” is why we won’t even try to remove him.
ideologically shifting from identifying as a Republican to leading the court’s liberal wing.
Stevens didn’t really change all that much during his tenure. And this kind of framing feeds the idea that the opposite of “Republican” is “liberal”.
Stevens famously said that every new justice that arrived on the court during his tenure was more conservative than his predecessor. (I would make an exception for Ginsburg, who replaced Byron White, but this comment remains largely true and might even apply to Trump’s nominees. Though it would be hard to be further to the right than Scalia, Gorsuch might pull it off.)
Stevens didn’t change his philosophy; he just saw people to his left replaced by people to his right.
His dissent in Bush v. Gore remains classic. He eviscerated Scalia’s transparent partisan nonsense. It’s a shame that the GOP has evolved to a point where justices like Scalia are favored over those like Stevens. Conservative jurisprudence has devolved to a point where pretty much any and every ruling is results-driven, as opposed to adhering to any kind of coherent judicial philosophy.
These “Republican-turned-Liberal” headlines drive me crazy. Stevens himself explained, more than once, that he wasn’t the one who changed; it was the Rethugliklan party, which has been merrily driving itself into the realm of undisguised authoritarianism ever since St. Ronnie was canonized, that changed.
He should be termed as an “old school Republican” or some such.
And somewhat OT but for the record, Reagan was racist too. Anyone who fails to grasp the meaning of his announcing his candidacy for President in Philadelphia, Mississippi, is either daft or wantonly blind.
This is 100% correct. Stevens was, politically, more or less a member of the GOP’s now-extinct Rockefeller Republican branch. About 20 years ago, I attended a Q&A where he was speaking, and he described himself as having a conservative judicial philosophy in that he respected the precedents of the past and continued to apply them faithfully when new cases arose. That made him a “liberal” in the sense that he upheld established liberal rulings of the past and resisted the naked revanchism of the Rehnquist and Roberts regimes.
That would require a constitutional amendment passed by 2/3rds in both the House and Senate, then ratification by the legislatures of 3/4ths of the states. Ain’t gonna happen.
One fairly easy to observe difference between modern “conservatives” and “liberals” is that the former are clearly dominated and motivated by fear, both the specific fear of losing their privilege, status and “way of life”, and the inchoate fear of modernity and change, while the latter either welcome such changes, are indifferent to them, or have learned to adapt to them, realizing that they’re inevitable.
Conservatives are basically emotional infantiles with a strong selfish streak who think it’s all about them, and simply don’t see others as equals, lacking empathy, and shape their policy views and political methods to suit their perceived needs and wants. They are that odious, insufferable, literal and humorous child no one liked in grade school, in adult bodies.
Scalia embodied this. His every utterance all but screamed “Me Me Me Me ME!!!”, and he OOZED desperation and fear, of non-Christians, non-whites, women, gays, furriners, liberals, free-thinkers–anyone who wasn’t like him and/or held different views and/or embraced modernity. He was a fossil who refused to go quietly to the museum display where he clearly belonged. Plus he was a selfish and rotten person. He was thus a typical modern “conservative”.
Stevens, OTOH, came across as a genial and happy man who was quite comfortable with himself and long ago adopted the manta “live and let live”, accepting the world as it was (well, the parts that couldn’t and needn’t be changed, at least) and focusing on real problems that needed to be addressed, like inequality and injustice, for which he reserved his ire and energy.
It’s not coincidental, I believe, that he outlived Scalia by decades. All other things being equal, being a happy and contended person adds years to one’s life. I suspect that this will prove true for Thomas and perhaps Kavs (just not till 2021, though, I hope, for obvious reasons). It’s for this reason that I suspect that Thomas will retire by next year.
Rockefeller was probably more of a moderate than liberal, given his policies on drugs, sentencing and prisons, but yeah, a liberal compared to today’s Repubs. Similarly, Stevens was clearly not a conservative in the modern, Buckley, Reagan and Roberts mold, but rather in the older sense of taking a more conservative but not overly rigid approach to constitutional interpretation, being guided as much by the perceived spirit of the constitution as by its literal text. So, a conservative approach but with a liberal sensibility. I suspect that rulings made this way are the ones that tend to stick.
He was the last of the WWII vets in the government. Now we’re controlled by boomers and gen x. What happened to us?
Thanks, I’m well aware of how the Constitutional Amendment process works. Just because it’s not going to happen now does not mean it never will.
“Stevens experienced significant personal transformation while on the bench, ideologically shifting from identifying as a Republican to leading the court’s liberal wing”
No no no no no no no no.
That is just plain wrong.
Stevens’ politics are not what changed.
The political bent of the Court as a whole changed, shifting significantly to the right after Thomas and Scalia joined and Rehnquist was elevated to Chief Justice.
And it should be remembered that the Court has been under a majority of Republican nominated Justices since Eisenhower’s 2nd term.
Remove the Federalist Society as the rubber stamp required for conservative judicial nominees.
It’s not the boomers and Xers that bother me, it’s the Reaganauts that do.