Balkinization  

Monday, January 30, 2006

Partisan entrenchment

JB

This New York Times article describes a twenty year plan among conservative legal elites to stock the federal courts with conservatives, in preparation for packing the Supreme Court with more of the same. At the margin, the various machinations described in the article may have mattered some. Far more important, however, were repeated victories at the polls and the transformation of the Republican Party into a social movement party. It is the success of that social movement (or more correctly, interlocking set of different conservative social movements) that produced today's conservative Supreme Court majority. If you don't like what the Supreme Court is doing today, you or your parents shouldn't have voted for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. And if you want more moderate Republican appointees to the federal courts, you or your parents should have returned more Democrats to the Senate. Sure there can be variations at the margin, but you have to look at the larger structural features that have help shape the current situation. When you have a Republican President and 55 Republican votes in the Senate, you should pretty much expect appointments like John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

Comments:

Correct. I wrote about judicial ethics and politicization yesterday, taking off on the Scalia Federalist trip and the Minnesota judge race decisions. There's a link to the code of conduct for US judges in there too, if you don't have it.
 

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Give them what they ask for, no thicker a rope could one hope for. Now will everything that goes wrong will appear more likely to be their fault?
 

What I get from your linked Times article is Bork saying almost but still not all the way there. How rugged an individualist is a Chief Justice whose wife is a working attorney, now, in times so changed since the Federalist Society sprang whole from the mind of Zeus? No, times and these people, too, have changed, jurists though they be, and conservatives at that. It is interesting to depict the Alito battle for confirmation as the apotheosis of a judiciary-based Social Movement. I hope he reveres the institution which has nurtured him, and that he appreciates fully the measure of Bork's disappointment that even Alito plus Roberts do not a sure majority make. Though there are two more posts on the SCOTUS bench maturing toward the replacement processes.
 

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