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It's been a while since we've gotten any dope on speculations and hand-wringing over the composition of the Supreme Court. It must be getting close to election year. Hey, it's just another year and a half away. It's like Christmas: you can never begin too soon!
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On election night 1980, after the scope of Ronald Reagan’s landslide became clear, a major television network solemnly reported that Justice Thurgood Marshall had told friends that he planned to step down from the Supreme Court and allow the defeated president, Jimmy Carter, to nominate a successor. I was serving as a law clerk for Marshall at the time, and can state categorically that nothing could have been further from the truth.
This bit of history comes to mind because of the growing chorus calling for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to step down. A recent Associated Press article related what “Democrats and liberals” consider a “nightmare vision of the Supreme Court’s future” -- to wit, that President Obama loses his re-election bid, and Ginsburg, now 78 and the oldest member of the court, retires due to ill health. The horror story continues: “The new Republican president appoints Ginsburg’s successor, cementing conservative domination of the court.” The solution seems to be that Ginsburg (and Stephen Breyer, 72, second-oldest among the justices appointed by Democrats) ought to leave the court now, “for the good of the issues they believe in.”
-- Steven L. Carter for Bloomberg
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On election night 1980, after the scope of Ronald Reagan’s landslide became clear, a major television network solemnly reported that Justice Thurgood Marshall had told friends that he planned to step down from the Supreme Court and allow the defeated president, Jimmy Carter, to nominate a successor. I was serving as a law clerk for Marshall at the time, and can state categorically that nothing could have been further from the truth.
This bit of history comes to mind because of the growing chorus calling for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to step down. A recent Associated Press article related what “Democrats and liberals” consider a “nightmare vision of the Supreme Court’s future” -- to wit, that President Obama loses his re-election bid, and Ginsburg, now 78 and the oldest member of the court, retires due to ill health. The horror story continues: “The new Republican president appoints Ginsburg’s successor, cementing conservative domination of the court.” The solution seems to be that Ginsburg (and Stephen Breyer, 72, second-oldest among the justices appointed by Democrats) ought to leave the court now, “for the good of the issues they believe in.”
-- Steven L. Carter for Bloomberg
