At the moment the Supreme Court consists of one very smart centrist-liberal Democrat, Ruth Bader Ginsburg; one very smart centrist-centrist Democrat, Stephen Breyer; one very old good-hearted Republican, John Paul Stevens; one very tired center-right Republican, David Souter; one right-establishment Republican, Anthony Kennedy; and four raving Republican wingnuts with varying degrees of cleverness. Seven Republicans, only three of them attached to reality, and two Democrats.
This degree of Republican partisan entrenchment in the court is--in a word--bizarre. It is not a good thing.
I think Brad's assessment of the justices is spot on. I would add that the three most likely retirements - likely to come in the next four years - are Ginsburg, Stevens, and Souter. That's three of the four justices usually considered the "liberal" side of the court (even though two of them are in fact Republicans). Losing more ground to the wacko side of the court would have been beyond bad. We already have bad, even very bad. Losing more ground would have been disasterous.
DeLong continues:
Moreover. this Supreme Court forfeited any claim to be due deference from the other branches of the government when it prostituted its office to install George W. Bush as president eight years ago. It then established a new constitutional principle: that if an election is close and if one party has appointed an overwhelming majority of justices of the Supreme Court, that majority gets to decide the election.
Republican hack Alex Castellanos said last night, on CNN: "There is no way for us Republicans to win this election unless we had a 9-0 majority on the Supreme Court." That was a joke. But it really wasn't a joke at all, was it?
Think about that.
Is this a constitutional principle that we want established? No. But it will be established unless we declare that this is not, in fact, a constitutional moment we want to embrace.
He goes on to propose a punitive solution for Congress to enact. His proposal is not the least bit likely to happen (he likes to expound these ideas as a matter of principle, and more power to him), and probably shouldn't happen. But in my opinion, we should take the time to reflect and be clearheaded about how truly awful our Supreme Court is, and how truly unacceptable their behavior was in the 2000 election.
One of the many steps of our long, slow national exhale.
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Long slow exhale. That is good.
2000 was reprehensible. And somehow the national discourse has gotten to the point where any criticism is dismissed as sour grapes or irrelevant. But we have a real and awful precedent on our hands.
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