Word: bench
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...former Supreme Court Justice William Brennan used to tell his clerks, "Five votes can do anything around here." That was in the days when Brennan regularly stitched together a narrow liberal majority on a high bench that was delicately balanced between left and right. Those days are over. Five votes can still do anything. But now it's the court's increasingly assertive right wing that usually has them -- and sometimes more...
...majority, led by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, has been building in slow motion. In the early 1970s, during Rehnquist's first few terms on what was still a liberal-leaning bench, he was so isolated that his clerks took to calling him the Lone Ranger. These days he no longer rides alone: he routinely joins a group that includes Reagan appointees Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor and Bush appointee David Souter. Having written only a few rulings since joining the court this term, Souter remains something of an , enigma; yet he has clearly provided the right wing...
...almost palpable. Conservatives often used to accuse the Warren Court of taking decisions out of the hands of Congress and state legislatures. But even as his court is kicking some issues back to lawmakers, the Chief Justice has been willing to do some of his own legislating from the bench. A revealing case in point is his persistent effort to streamline capital punishment. For years Rehnquist urged Congress to pass a law that would prohibit death-row inmates from repeatedly filing so-called habeas corpus petitions requesting that their verdicts or sentences be reconsidered in court. Rehnquist complained that they...
...Rehnquist would not relent. When both federal judges and Democratic leaders in Congress resisted his efforts to expedite executions, he moved to achieve the same result from the high bench this term. His vehicle was a Georgia case, McCleskey v. Zant. Though it meant going further than the case required, the persuasive Chief Justice fashioned a 6-to-3 majority in favor of setting up procedural obstacles to repeated habeas corpus requests...
Liberals can take heart in the tendency of some Justices to shift views during their years on the bench. Blackmun moved to the left from his first days on the court. On the whole, O'Connor has drifted toward the center. Souter, who voted the same way as O'Connor in dozens of cases this term, may yet do the same. But the possibility of gradual leftward movement is cold comfort to liberals who realize their two aging champions, Marshall and Blackmun, may eventually be replaced by George Bush appointees. And that would almost certainly turn the conservative bloc into...