Thursday, January 27, 2022

Breyer Retires

U.S.Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has announced his retirement. Linda Greenhouse writes that he was the right man in the wrong age:

Justice Breyer’s belief in the power of facts, evidence and expertise was out of step in a postfactual age. The protections of the Voting Rights Act were no longer necessary in the South? The Constitution’s framers meant to give the populace an individual right to own a gun? Or, more recently, the federal agency charged with protecting American workers was likely powerless to protect the workplace from a deadly pandemic?

Really? Of course, Justice Breyer was on the losing side.

Observers of the court label Breyer a "pragmatist." Greenhouse disagrees:

Although the labels often affixed to Justice Breyer are “pragmatist” and “seeker of compromise,” it has always seemed to me that these, while not inaccurate, miss the mark. They discount the passion beneath the man’s cool and urbane persona, passion that I think stems from his early encounter with a court that understood the Constitution as an engine of progress.

That passion was obvious in his astonishing 21-minute oral dissent from the bench in 2007 from a school integration decision that, early in Chief Justice Roberts’s tenure, marked a significant turn away from the court’s commitment to ending segregation. The law professor Lani Guinier, in a famous article in The Harvard Law Review the next year, celebrated that dissent as “demosprudence,” a way of speaking law directly to the people in the expectation that they will then speak back to the lawmakers.

“I mean, there were three-quarters of a million new cases yesterday,” the justice said, his voice rising. “New cases. Nearly three-quarters — 700-and-some-odd thousand, OK?” He continued that the number was 10 times as high as when the Occupational Safety and Health Administration “put this rule in. The hospitals are today, yesterday, full, almost to the point of the maximum they’ve ever been in this disease, OK?”

Noting that the standard for granting an injunction of the sort the plaintiffs requested required a showing that the court’s intervention was in the public interest, he asked: “Is that what you’re doing now, to say it’s in the public interest in this situation to stop this vaccination rule, with nearly a million people — let me not exaggerate — nearly three-quarters of a million people, new cases every day? I mean, to me, I would find that unbelievable.”

Of course, that’s what the court did, and of course, Justice Breyer dissented.

Breyer's exit from the court is another reminder that we live in a dark, superstitious age.

Image: the New York Times

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's about time! I thought Breyer was going to make RFB's mistake and end up handing the GOP another seat. The SCOTUS really needs a 75 and out rule like we have. Lifetime appointments are a very bad idea.

Now sit back and watch the GOP outrage machine kick into high gear as Biden appoints a black woman - the sort of person the Supreme Court ruled has "no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

Cap

Anonymous said...

That should be RGB - damn fat fingers.

Cap

Ben Burd said...

Owen, I have no faith that the Dems can even get this one over the goal line. Having no appetite for the cut-throat tactics that this will demand I do not see anybody able to pull it off from the Dems side.

If that is the case then America deserves the mire that will ensue after the midterms. Hate to be such a wet blanket.

Owen Gray said...

The Republicans get more and more insane with each passing day, Cap.

Owen Gray said...

Not a problem, Cap.

Owen Gray said...

They don't need sixty votes, Ben. We'll see what Manchin and Sinema do.