Word: scalias
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...reasons you might expect. Kendall is the founder of the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC), a left-leaning legal think tank that watches Supreme Court decisions and advocates public-interest law. He points out that with the Court frequently deadlocked between more conservative voices (like Antonin Scalia and John Roberts) and more liberal ones (like Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg), the next President has the power to appoint a new Justice who will tilt the Court. Perennially debated matters, like abortion rights, could be at stake, along with new hot-button issues such as the rights of prisoners held...
...biggest surprise from the Supreme Court term that just ended: Barack Obama hearts the Roberts Court. At the end of June, the Democratic candidate praised Justice Antonin Scalia's 5-4 decision striking down the Washington ban on handgun possession, a ruling that recognizes the right to bear arms as an individual right. Two weeks earlier, from the other side of the ideological spectrum, Obama praised Justice Anthony Kennedy's 5-4 decision allowing enemy combatants to challenge their detentions in federal courts, a rebuke to the Bush Administration's policies toward Guantánamo detainees. Obama's only major quarrel...
According to Scalia, Roberts has used his power to assign opinions when he's in the majority to encourage his colleagues to write narrow decisions that Justices on both sides can accept. "The chief may say, 'Why don't you come along with a very narrow opinion? We can get seven votes for that, and it will look a lot better,'" Scalia recently said on The Charlie Rose Show. "You want to go along with the Chief Justice because ... you want to make the institution work...
...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...
...long will the changed mood last? The role of personality on the Supreme Court shouldn't be overstated. In cases in which they have strong, pre-existing constitutional views on issues from abortion to guns to Guantánamo, the Justices are unlikely to persuade one another. And as Scalia said, "What changes the court, I assure you, is much less the character of the Chief Justice--although that has some effect--than it is the nature of the people who have been appointed." That's why, regardless of Roberts' current consensus-building, the future of the court will be determined...