Word: bork
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That self-deprecating style has made Souter the Nowhere Man, a tabula rasa in the cult of personality -- and so the perfect post-Bork appointment. Law- review articles asserting opinions on controversial subjects? There are none. Sweeping court decisions? Souter, as a trial and appellate judge, narrowly ruled on the facts at hand. In Souter, Bush may have found the last person in America who does not think in opinionated sound bites. Souter, with his Yankee reticence, does not presume anyone would be interested in what he thinks if legal scholars have already thought about it. In that...
With the high court poised to tilt decisively to the right on several inflammatory issues, a nominee publicly committed to overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established the right to abortion, would provoke an outcry from the liberal forces that derailed Robert Bork's nomination in 1987. But if the President picked a Justice less inclined to overturn Roe, right-to- life activists and conservative Republicans already angered by Bush's retraction of his "no new taxes" pledge would be enraged. Facing these polarized options, the President deftly reduced the risk by selecting a Stealth candidate. Federal Appeals...
Bush is gambling that the liberal coalition that launched the fight against Bork will be stymied by a paradox: nothing could be more difficult than to draw battle lines on a blank slate. While there is ample evidence of the quality of Souter's intellect -- magna cum laude Harvard graduate, Rhodes scholar, Harvard law -- most of his judicial experience has been on New Hampshire's state supreme court, which is more likely to consider auto- insurance cases and commercial litigation than divisive social issues like abortion and affirmative action. Elevated to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston only last...
Both Republicans and Democrats have contributed to the deterioration of judicial appointments into political tests of strength. While the campaign against Bork was the most highly politicized in this century, it took place only after Ronald Reagan had loaded the lower federal courts with judges who met his own tests on abortion, prayer in school, affirmative action and the separation of powers. Both sides can also point to history to support their arguments about how Senators should interpret their constitutional mandate to "advise and consent" in the process of choosing Justices. Over the years 29 presidential nominees, about a fifth...
These are gurantees almost all Americans take for granted--guarantees that mark the outside bounds of acceptable constitutional interpretation in this day and age. The Senate nixed Bork because he didn't believe in such guarantees, and the Senate has every right to reject any future nominees who think the same...