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When Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980, the Supreme Court Justices were from left to right, Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, Byron White, John Paul Stevens, Lewis Powell, Potter Stewart, Warren Burger, and William Rehnquist.
This Supreme Court was at that point considered extremely Conservative. In fact to that point it was one of the most Conservative of Supreme Courts in history.
To get ANYWHERE near that level now Scalia and Thomas would have to go. They would have to be replaced with the political equivalents of Marshall and Brennan.
There is little hope of that. Both Marshall and Brennan believed that the Constitution of the United States banned the death penalty, they also believed that it provided for a right to education and far more controversially argued that the constitution provided for a right of women to choose what they did with their own bodies and would have voted to strike down laws such as the Hyde amendment.
Kennedy would have to be replaced with someone equivalent to Blackmun. He would have opposed FISA if it was in front of him because of his strong support of the right to privacy. He was also another opponent of the death penalty.
Breyer, Stevens, Sotomayor, and Ginsburg are then the moderates on the Court and not the left. Their 1980 equivalent would have been White, Stevens, Powell, and Stewart.
In the 80's Stevens was the middle. Now he is the most left wing member.
If Republicans held true to their words about not supporting judges who legislate from the bench they would support a strong shift in the Supreme Court. More precedents have been broken by this Court than any other Court in history. Even under W, this Court has legislated from the bench on issues that would have been considered properly within the remit of Congress to consider. That includes of course issues of campaign finance reform. They have effectively legislated on affirmative action, limits on the right to choose, removing the separation of church and state and increasing Presidential power. The vast bulk of this current Court also decided on the 2000 election.
The appointment of Judge Sotomayor and if rumours are correct, Cass Sunstein, are as far left as a Democratic President and Congress may be able to appoint to the Supreme Court but those appointments would not be anywhere near to restoring the Conservative balance of 1980, never mind restoring the days of the Warren Court.
It is not the Conservative end of the political spectrum that has taken over the Supreme Court it is the far far right. What was once considered extreme right wing has been adopted by Republicans. What was once considered Conservative is considered moderate. There is no Liberal balance.
Turning this around takes the thirty years that the Republicans had to entrench the views of the far right on the Supreme Court and thus the rest of the World and all of the disastrous ramifications of that we all now suffer from.
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