Word: bipartisanism
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...measure, the term that just ended was hardly a disaster for liberals. On the contrary, liberals won several important victories--not only the Guantánamo and child-rape cases but also a series of employment-discrimination cases in which the court sided with workers rather than employers, by broad, bipartisan majorities...
...what explains the new mood of bipartisan harmony on the Roberts Court? At least some of the credit goes to Roberts' personality and leadership style. He went out of his way to persuade his colleagues to turn down the volume and lighten up when they disagreed, even spicing up his dissent in a technical dispute between phone companies by borrowing playfully from Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone: "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose...
...personalization of judicial politics," whereby people identify the rule of law with the way individual Justices vote in closely divided cases. Embracing as a model his greatest predecessor, John Marshall, Roberts said he would use his power to assign majority opinions to promote narrow decisions agreed to by wide, bipartisan majorities rather than by polarizing 5-4 splits. On an evenly divided court, Roberts felt he could convince the liberal and conservative camps that converging on narrow opinions was in everyone's interest...
...most part, he said, because his colleagues were eager to be nice to the newcomer, like prospective in-laws meeting a fiancé for the first time at Thanksgiving. Then the honeymoon ended. When various Justices were asked last year whether they thought Roberts could rebuild an atmosphere of bipartisan harmony, they were hardly encouraging. Scalia scoffed, "Good luck!" Justice Stephen Breyer suggested Roberts could best foster comity by joining Breyer's opinions. Kennedy had a similar response: "Just let me write all the opinions...
...Campaign finance reform has been a career cause for the Arizona senator, highlighted by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which he championed with Democrat Russ Feingold. Although the act contained landmark transparency provisions, outside influence on elections is still pervasive, with 527 groups like the anti-John Kerry organization Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the liberal group MoveOn.org's Voter Fund playing major roles in the last presidential election. This year's election will be the most expensive in history - presidential candidates have already raised over $900 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And that...