S. Blumenthal: All the president's men

[kskiska]

With O'Connor's retirement from the US supreme court, the Republican counter-revolution sees the chance of a lifetime

Ever since Franklin D Roosevelt breached the conservative fortress of the US supreme court, Republicans have dreamed of restoration. Every Republican president attempted to fill the court with judges who would stall, overcome and even reverse change in the law and in American society. President Eisenhower felt that appointing Earl Warren as chief justice was the "biggest damn-fool mistake I ever made". Warren became the leader of liberal jurisprudence, using the law to advance social equality and rights. "Impeach Warren!" became the cry of the right.

President Nixon attempted to pack the court with two southern segregationists who were rejected by the Senate. His choice for chief justice, Warren Burger, as conservative as he was, disappointed him and he took to calling him "a dumb Swede". At last, he selected William Rehnquist, the farthest-right candidate he could find, a judge who had personally intimidated blacks and Hispanics from voting at polling places and written a memo in favour of segregation. Before his confirmation hearing Nixon instructed him to "be as mean and rough as they said you were".

Rehnquist's consistent conservatism made him President Reagan's natural choice for chief justice. Reagan, too, hoped to pack the court with justices who would play well with Rehnquist. He appointed Antonin Scalia, even further to the right than Rehnquist, and Robert Bork, perhaps even to Scalia's right, a dyspeptic reactionary rejected by the Democratic Senate. And Reagan named Sandra Day O'Connor, gaining credit for appointing the first woman, who also happened to be a conservative former state senator from Arizona, such a close friend of fellow Arizonan Rehnquist that they had once dated.

President George HW Bush believed that he was filling the court with traditional conservatives, but played two wild cards. David Souter has aligned himself with the moderates and liberals. Clarence Thomas has been consumed with a bottomless ideological fervour fed by rage and resentment; he appears not to have recovered from his confirmation hearing, where he was accused of sexual harassment, which he decried as a "hi-tech lynching". Initially Thomas walked in the shadow of Scalia, but he has emerged on an even farther shore of the right.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1522946,00.html

[Wetzelbill]

1. Sid's the shit