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Roberts Steer Supreme Court Right Back To Reagan
Keep in mind that the article below is from a liberal perspective but it makes clear that those who think it does not matter which political party is in power are dead wrong.
The appointments of Chief Justice John Roberts and Sameul Alito by President Bush have moved the court in a more conservative direction. The result is a ban on partial birth abortion and more. Read below;
Roberts steers court right back to Reagan
By Joan Biskupic, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — In a remarkable first full term of the remade Supreme Court, a narrow majority of justices changed the law on race, abortion, free speech and a swath of other issues affecting American life.
Long-standing precedents were discarded or reinterpreted. Government interests prevailed over individual rights. Business won at the expense of consumers and workers. And people on the fringe, such as rabble-rousing students and atheists, lost out.
In the 2006-07 annual term that ended Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and newest justice Samuel Alito, set the tone. Of 19 cases that broke 5-4 along ideological lines, that quintet prevailed in 13 of them.
The conservative majority drew increasingly heated protests from liberal Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.
No case revealed the chasm between the conservatives and the liberals as much as Thursday's decision preventing the use of race in school assignments. The dueling written opinions ran for 178 pages, and the ceremonial reading of the opinion highlights went on for nearly an hour in the white marble and red velvet courtroom.
"It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much," Breyer said.
Undoing past decisions
Roberts, fulfilling the conservatism inspired by his personal hero, Ronald Reagan, is taking command of the bench in a way that eluded his predecessor, the late William Rehnquist.
The Roberts court showed a distinct willingness to confront past court rulings as it:
• Struck down programs in Louisville and Seattle that used students' race as a factor in school placement to build diversity across a district. The majoritynarrowly interpreted the breadth of a 2003 case endorsing the use of race in higher education admissions for campus diversity.
•Upheld an unconditional ban on a midterm abortion procedure that Congress called "partial birth." The decision abandoned the view of a 2000 case that such a ban was unconstitutional without an exception for when a physician believes it's best for the mother's health.
•Diluted a portion of U.S. campaign-finance law that barred corporations and labor unions from running broadcast ads mentioning candidates right before an election. A 2003 court decision had broadly upheld the ban.
• Limited the reach of a 1969 case that said students do not "shed their constitutional rights … at the schoolhouse gate," by allowing principals and teachers to discipline students for messages that undercut anti-drug policies.
The same five-justice majority on Thursday overturned a 1911 ruling that barred manufacturers from setting minimum retail prices for their goods.
"The court this term addressed issues that many people care about," says Harvard University law professor Richard Fallon. "The fact that the Roberts Court could do so much in its first term makes it more likely that it will continue this way."
Fallon adds that this more conservative court "is taking us backwards and aggressively changing the law."
Notre Dame Law School professor Richard Garnett, a former law clerk to Rehnquist who thinks the court is moving in the right direction, describes the shift in less dramatic terms. "I don't see it as a counterrevolution. I think it is more modest. They are refusing to extend precedents with which they have problems."
While legal analysts disagree about the extent of the shift to the right, there is no disputing that the liberals on the court are voicing more frustration, and even moral outrage, than occurred during Rehnquist's stewardship.
"It is intolerable for the judicial system to treat people this way, and there is not even a technical justification for condoning this bait and switch," Souter wrote for the dissenting foursome as the majority spurned an appeal by an Ohio defendant who missed a filing deadline by days because a federal judge gave him inaccurate information.
To Thursday's ruling rejecting Seattle and Louisville area efforts to ensure racial integration, Stevens said it was "cruel irony" that Roberts would invoke the court's decision against segregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education. "It is my firm conviction that no member of the court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today's decision," Stevens said.
The transformed court is a significant achievement and likely enduring legacy for President Bush. His first appointee, Roberts, 52, took the helm from William Rehnquist in fall of 2005.
Rehnquist, who was named by Richard Nixon in 1972 and elevated to chief in 1986 by Reagan, presided over a court whose conservatism was revealed most consistently in decisions on government structure and that favored the states in disputes with Washington.
Rehnquist was never able, despite his own strong views, to prevail on many high-profile social policy dilemmas. In fact, he dissented when the majority struck down the "partial birth" abortion ban in 2000 and when it upheld campus affirmative action and campaign-finance law in 2003.
The turnabout under Roberts is more directly traced to Bush's replacement of retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor with Alito, 57, in January 2006.
O'Connor, a 1981 Reagan appointee who moved to the left with time, was the key vote to strike down the state abortion ban, endorse race in college admissions for diversity and uphold the campaign finance law known as McCain-Feingold for its Senate sponsors.
"What a difference a single justice makes," says Goodwin Liu, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Alito also offered a check in some cases on how far the conservative bloc went. When the majority carved out an exception to speech rights in a decision against a student with a "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner, Alito wrote a separate opinion offering a word of caution.
He said he was joining the decision on the understanding that it only targeted messages related to illegal drugs and not speech on any political or social issue.
The Reagan factor
In his 1980 presidential campaign and after winning office, Ronald Reagan emphasized what he believed were the excesses of the judiciary in the wake of the Earl Warren era and liberal intervention in social policy that is usually the domain of elected officials.
Reagan set the bench on a conservative path with his choices for the Supreme Court and lower federal courts during two terms. Roberts was with him in the beginning. He joined the administration in 1981, saying he was moved by Reagan's inaugural speech. "I felt he was speaking to me."
As a lawyer for Reagan and then later in the first Bush administration, Roberts often asserted that judges were improperly creating rights not in the Constitution. He took a narrow view of abortion rights and was involved in efforts to curtail affirmative action, school busing and other programs intended to bring minorities into settings where they were once shut out.
Roberts' opposition to race-based programs to spur integration was loud and clear in Thursday's ruling. "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," he wrote, seeking to end all programs that take account of race.
Kennedy objected to that statement, so Roberts fell one vote short of a majority for that hard-line stance. But in the view of dissenting justices and other critics of the push to the right, Roberts has carried out a new vision for the court.
"Yesterday, the citizens of this nation could look for guidance to this court … concerning desegregation," Breyer said. "Today, they cannot."
Looking to the breadth of the term, Fallon says, "It takes a long time to remake the Supreme Court. Now we're seeing the court in the image Ronald Reagan dreamed of. It is sort of poetic that Chief Justice Roberts is someone who long ago was inspired by Reagan."
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