They're still so pissed that she didn't retire so 0bama could replace her. But, no-o-o-o-o, she was too precious and couldn't just step down.
Perhaps she wanted to be replaced by the first female president. And then a funny thing happened on the way to oval office.
With the swingman likely moving from Kennedy to Roberts, the Court will make a clear move to the right. It will be a long, lonely and frustrating session for Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan. It can't be much fun to be a highly partisan Supreme Court justice and be irrelevant.
With the swingman likely moving from Kennedy to Roberts, the Court will make a clear move to the right.
Astute. Even if Roberts is the new Kennedy, it will still be more conservative than having Kennedy on the Court.
I saw a paragraph that brought your remark to mind.
Kennedy has long been the Supreme Court’s “swing” vote (though he hates that term) and thus is most often in the majority in those 5-4 cases that split along conventional ideological lines. Well, this term there were 19 such hotly split decisions, just under 30 percent of the total (a bit high but within modern norms). Of those 19 decisions, 15 featured Kennedy joining the four “conservatives” and none had Kennedy joining the four “liberals.” (Two of them did have Chief Justice John Roberts joining the liberal bloc.) That simply hasn’t happened in the 13 years since Justice Samuel Alito replaced Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to put Kennedy in his vaunted role as the man in the middle.
Kennedy leaving the bench in a fit of conservative glory? Roberts rising to be a swing vote as he was on 0-care and as the new swing vote? Maybe some of each?
Anyway, the concrete numbers show that Kennedy clove to the conservative SCOTUS and ignored the lib SCOTUS in his final term. And that had to be a deliberate choice. And Roberts may have known of Kennedy's intention to retire even well before Trump did, which might have made Roberts more eager to carve out his new swing vote role.
Having gotten rid of Kennedy, Roberts may well rise to be the new swing vote. Exactly as Kennedy himself became the "swing vote" following the Sandra Day O'Connor retirement. (Didja know that old bat was still hearing cases in 2016 as an adjutant judge or something? Along with a staffed federal judge's office. Yeeesh. Can't they ever just go away quietly?)
