At least, according to the American people. Bloomberg 14 March:
An overwhelming majority of Americans think that the Supreme Court justices’ political views will influence how they vote on the Obama health care reform cases, a Bloomberg News poll has found.
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Our fresh American SCOTUS justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan (appointed by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate under Harry Reid’s Presidency thereof) do not hog the spotlights of political campaign footage. Before confirmation, Sotomayor’s nomination was strewn with an Obama for America internet campaign “I Stand with Sotomayor.” I only dug up associate Justice Sotomayor’s jurisprudence once; Being a Latin-American, she used the phrase stare decisis which was used on this blog discursively within the past week. Sotomayor was a voice against how Citizens United vs. FEC turned out. I am not sure if SC justices can raise money through Committees to Elect (or to be nominated, confirmed or perpetuated). Elected and vying politicians’ CTE’s raise useful money, but this cannot be spent on the rent for your personal family living space (One reason why we Democrats still hold the U.S. Senate in Delaware).
is that anyone would think that politics do not influence the Court.
This isn’t a criticism. It’s just a reflection that the federal courts are a branch of government with members selected as part of a political process. It would be ludicrous to ask whether one thinks that “politics will influence the way Congress votes.” Of course it does. Why would things be any different for the courts?
The courts have generally enjoyed a much higher degree of respect than Congress or the Presidency, such that it’s considered perilous for politicians to rail against a court ruling.
This poll result may suggest a move away from that notion and toward the idea that there’s less of a distinction between the Supremes and ordinary politicians. I think _Citizens United vs. FEC_ and how the SuperPACs immediately showed up in its wake was a big perception changer. A ruling that overthrew the ACA could be another one.
Ergo, people have recognized that it’s not just the “idea” that there’s less of a distinction, but that there’s actually less of a distinction.
The court’s got to get its act together, though, because it seems like every 75-100 years the SCOTUS forgets its place… and every 75-100 years a powerful President comes along and lays the smack down on them. Lincoln did it, FDR did it and it may just be Obama’s turn to do it, too.
What has Obama ever “smacked down”? He’s afraid of the religious enterprises, the big banks, the Republicans, etc… He doesn’t have the nerve. Or he’s holding it in reserve for the day after Election Day, per what he told Medvedev.
Certainly the ideology of the Justices will have an impact on their opinions, in both directions. When people “lose” a decision in the SCOTUS they often blame politics but when they win, it is always because the wise men and women have upheld the Constitution.
The current court being 5-4 gives liberals the reason to decry “politics” as a reason for any loss but please be honest an admit the minority 4 voters are also voting based on their liberal ideology.
Whatever happened to their decisions being final no matter how the majority felt? Think back on some momentous decisions which the majority of US citizens believed was wrong, at the time, but we now believe was the right choice.
I hope this court throws out Obamacare’s mandate and then the entire bill based on it being non-severable. But… I will live with whatever the 9 wide men and women decide.
That’s true. The difference is that the conservatives are potentially using their ideology to strike down a massive congressional statute in a highly activist and dramatically anti-democratic fashion. The liberals are using theirs to defer to elected officials. That’s a big difference.
There are a lot more Court decisions that go in the opposite direction. See Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, Korematsu v. US, etc., etc., etc.
If Chief Justice Taft was still on the Court I might agree with this characterization, but I don’t consider any of the current justices to be all that large 😉
Certainly, ideology has always informed decisions, but it hasn’t driven them like it’s doing with today’s conservatives.
There haven’t been guys like Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia who are so outwardly and brazenly partisan that they go around engaging in partisan activities outside the court — indeed, financially benefiting from them.
There haven’t bee guys like Samuel Alito who would pull a Joe “You Lie!” Wilson during President’s State of the Union and say “not true” during it, then snub the President at the next State of the Union.
There haven’t been many cases like Gore vs. Bush that were purely partisan, or cases wide-sweeping cases like Citizens United that found entirely new powers for corporations that have put in place the foundation for corporations to rule America like an aristocracy. There haven’t been ideologically-driven cases that ignore decades and maybe even centuries of precedent to do the NRA’s bidding, like McDonald v. Chicago and DC vs. Heller, which practically invented a new understanding out of the second amendment.
So, no. You don’t get to say this is just more of the same and people are unhappy about it because they find themselves outnumbered. What’s happening in today’s courts is at the very least unprecedented in our lifetimes.
There haven’t been Clarence Thomases making money off being a movement conservative — and then lying about it in disclosure forms. There haven’t been Antonin Scalia’s travelling the world off the dimes of the very people who’s cases he’s deciding, and then refusing to recuse himself. And we haven’t seen so many cases like this, happening so soon, practically rewriting the constitution to favor an elite corporate class. These are all new and dangerous things unique to this court and we should all recognize it for what it is: an unprecedented overreach that needs to be addressed, soon.
The Court has a long history of being where the plutocrats get what they want when the elected branches (temprorarily) stop catering to their whims. See Lochner v. NY from 1905 as an example.
However, the open partisan nature of it is more brazen than in days gone by. That may be the seed of their undoing this time. To the extent they are perceived as partisan hacks, it undermines their long-run clout.
… encompass a much wider and wiser viewpoint than a mere choosing of sides; a regard for precedent, fairness, due process and self-respect over advantage seeking being hallmarks of the learned man (and woman) whatever their politics.
I will concede that when liberal justices vote they do so on the basis of ideological reasoning, and the entire premise behind the ‘living constitution’ movement is precisely that progressive ideology can and should force society forward. But the conservative justices supposedly stick with ‘originalism’ and textualism and claim that they only call balls and strikes and always decry activist judges that interpret the law in a favorable way as opposed to judges that simply enforce ‘the law as its plainly understood and/or as the fathers intended it to be understood’. The only conservative who has been consistent in his reasoning has been Justice Thomas, who give him credit has been quite public with his distaste for Lochner and most of the modern jurisprudence regarding Commerce Clause.
Kennedy and Roberts seemed to ask fair questions and Alito has made no pretense to originalism or textualism and seems to hold a High Tory jurisprudence (http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/burkean-justice_576470.html) so those three can get free passes. But Scalia, were he to vote against this which he seems to be near to doing, will completely violate all of the principles that he claims to hold sacred. Even his question regarding broccoli betrays that, in fact, he knows he is overturning stare decisis on Commerce Clause regulation that he is upheld in the past, including the infamous Wickford v Filburn ruling that upholds the Commerce Clause as justification that does give the government power to tell you how much food you can grow and eat for yourself. He is repudiating his paens to legislative supremacy and democratic enactment of laws in his Lawrence and Casey dissents. I have defended Scalia and his brand of constitutional interpretation, as in the past it has defended certain progressive principles including unlimited free speech, strict church/state separation, states rights on social issues, and strong defendant protections. But he is seemingly ditching his principles to score a cheap shot on this President, I can see no other rationale behind his shift here. And for a conservative like yourself (and many other) would openly admit the whole paen to original intent is just a canard to justify right wing judicial activism seems to repudiate the entire foundation of right wing jurisprudence for the past quarter century.
Charliie P thinks that Tony is phoning it in… I quite agree.
there needs to be checks and balances on the courts, especially these runaway conservative partisan courts.
Personally, I think we just need to accept the fact that the SCOTUS is a group of nine human beings, none of whom are infallible, some of whom are borderline nuts in their ideologically-driven quest to remake America for their Republican friends.
If we can accept the fact that there’s nothing sacred and infallible about the courts, we should be willing and able to actually go in and change the constitution when they get things wrong. We treat the document as something sacred and permanent, but it’s not.
Even the founders said that it should be changed from time to time. I doubt any of them expected what we have today, a document many people don’t even realize can be changed.
Or a term limit. Fifteen years, even. But how many of these decisions lately have been written by the clerks as the “justice” sat in another room with a slipping grasp on their sanity?
…that whatever the ruling, the side that agrees will hail the Court’s astute legal reasoning, and the side that disagrees will decry the Court’s descent into partisan politics. Ryan makes some good points about some ethical concerns which I think need to be addressed, but I do find myself closer to agreement with JohnD than usual on this one.
This is why the last truly judicial conservative was Justice Souter who revered stare decisis and nearly resigned over Bush v Gore. This would be the worst decision since Bush v Gore and far more activist and less reasoned than Citizens United (I agree with the court’s contention that under the current Constitution political speech is sacrosanct, I completely disagree that donations are speech as they are obviously economic transactions but I digress…)