Fingers Crossed
by digby
I hope this analysis is correct. But I’m not getting my hopes up:
Obama’s strategy worked when he chose Sonia Sotomayor to replace Justice David Souter last year — announce the criteria he deems the most vital for a nominee, vet the nominees with no embarrassing gaffes or leaks, and pick the one with whom he feels the most comfort.Confirmability was a factor then, not a driver. Expect much the same now.Not even one year later, Obama must replace the liberal lion of the court, Justice John Paul Stevens, who on Friday announced his coming retirement.In choosing a nominee over the next few weeks, Obama is inclined to stick with his formula of going all in, like he did in getting a health care reform law done, the biggest and most consuming fight of his presidency. The view from the White House is that the president is almost certain to face a political and ideological fight in this election year no matter who he nominates to the court; the only issue is to what degree.So why scale back?
They didn’t want to fight for Dawn Johnson so it’s hard for me to believe they want to fight for liberal in a high profile Supreme Court battle. In fact, it’s hard to see them fighting for a moderate Republican like Stevens:
Justice John Paul Stevens’s departure from the Supreme Court represents the end of an era. Just not the one you are probably thinking of. Stevens’s unblinking devotion to human rights, civil rights, and the rights of the little guy have led him to be widely seen as the Last Great Liberal Justice, the end of a lineage that included William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall and William O. Douglas. But Stevens is something else entirely. He is actually the last of the Moderate Republican Justices. Stevens himself advanced this view in a an interview with the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin last month. “For many decades,” Toobin wrote, “there have been moderate Republicans on the Court — John M. Harlan II and Potter Stewart (appointed by Eisenhower), Lewis F. Powell and Harry Blackmun (Nixon), David H. Souter (Bush I). Stevens is the last of them, and his departure will mark a cultural milestone. The moderate-Republican tradition that he came out of ‘goes way back,’ Stevens said. ‘But things have changed.'” What’s changed, of course, is the Court’s steady march to the far right. The four zealots on the Court — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — engage in such extremist, blindered legal thinking that there’s almost no chance any of them will ever join an even vaguely mainstream verdict.
Sadly, I think it’s much more likely that we will see what today is called “moderate” but which is, by historical terms, a very conservative justice. I will be thrilled to be wrong.
.