{"id":7262,"date":"2010-10-04T12:51:03","date_gmt":"2010-10-04T16:51:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=7262"},"modified":"2010-10-04T12:53:49","modified_gmt":"2010-10-04T16:53:49","slug":"u-s-supreme-court-is-back-in-session","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/7262\/u-s-supreme-court-is-back-in-session\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Supreme Court is Back in Session"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s the first Monday in October which means that the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is back in session.\u00a0 Uber-liberal constitutional law expert Erwin Chemerinsky is not celebrating the occasion<\/a>.\u00a0 Instead, he bemoans the conservative \u2018take-over\u2019 of the court and sites as evidence the fact that Republican presidents from Nixon to Bush II made a total of 12 appointments to SCOTUS while only two Democrat nominees made it onto the bench.\u00a0 (Bill Clinton appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, while Jimmy Carter was faced with no vacancies during his term.)<\/p>\n

Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Irvine\u2019s law school, singles out 4 of the 12 appointments (John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito) as proof of the conservative ascendency.\u00a0 But for conservatives a success rate of 33% is hardly a victory; especially when considering that both of President Barack Obama\u2019s SCOTUS appointments replaced Republican nominees, yet didn’t alter the conservative-liberal voting patterns.\u00a0 Gerald Ford appointed John Paul Stevens, a man who ended his tenure as the leader o the court\u2019s liberal bloc.\u00a0 Bush I appointed David Souter, a justice who voted in lock-step with Stevens and the court\u2019s other liberals.<\/p>\n

True, Bush I gave us Thomas, and Reagan hit a home run with Scalia, but Reagan also put soul-crushing moderates like Sandra Day O\u2019Connor and Anthony Kennedy on the bench; two people who repeatedly frustrated conservatives on issues across the political spectrum.\u00a0 Ironically, at least to some, is the SCOTUS legacy of Bush II who made solid conservative appointments with Roberts and Alito.\u00a0 That these two often team with Thomas and Scalia (and manage to cajole Kennedy to heed his better angels) is more the result of a historical accident than a carefully executed strategy.<\/p>\n

Imagine the kind of country we could be enjoying had Republican presidents from Nixon to Bush I had a conservative justice success rate of 66% rather than 33%.\u00a0 As it is, since at least the Eisenhower Administration (Earl Warren, William Brennan) liberals like Chemerinsky have benefited handsomely from liberal appointments by supposedly conservative GOP presidents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s the first Monday in October which means that the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is back in session.\u00a0 Uber-liberal constitutional law expert Erwin Chemerinsky is not celebrating the occasion.\u00a0 Instead, he bemoans the conservative \u2018take-over\u2019 of the court and sites as evidence the fact that Republican presidents from Nixon to Bush II […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1902,285,1494,1594,1901,717,941,1904,942,1903,284],"class_list":["post-7262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-anthony-kennedy","tag-antonin-scalia","tag-clarence-thomas","tag-constitutional-law","tag-eriwn-chemerinsky","tag-john-paul-stevens","tag-john-roberts","tag-ruth-bader-ginsburg","tag-samuel-alito","tag-stephen-breyer","tag-u-s-supreme-court"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7262"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7265,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7262\/revisions\/7265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}