Seems like it's the liberal bench's turn to retire en masse, which means at very best the Court drifts no further to the right.The Grey Lady wrote:Justice Stevens to Retire After 34 Years
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
WASHINGTON — Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, leader of the liberal wing of the Supreme Court, announced on Friday that he would retire at the end of this term, setting up a confirmation battle over his replacement that is virtually certain to dominate the political scene this summer.
In a brief letter to President Obama, whom he addressed as “my dear Mr. President,” Justice Stevens said he was announcing his retirement now because he had “concluded that it would be in the best interests of the Court to have my successor appointed and confirmed well in advance of the commencement of the Court’s next term” in October.
Mr. Obama, appearing in the Rose Garden Friday afternoon after returning home from a trip to Prague, pledged to “move quickly” to name a successor who, he said, would possess qualities similar to those of Justice Stevens: “an independent mind, a record of excellence and integrity, a fierce dedication to the rule of law and a keen understanding of how the law affects the daily lives of ordinary people.” Mr. Obama said he wanted someone who, like Justice Stevens, “knows that in a democracy, powerful interest must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens.”
The president said he had spoken briefly to the justice, and had thanked him for serving his country. “He will soon turn 90 this month,” the president said, “but he leaves his position at the top of his game.”
Justice Stevens’s retirement had been widely expected. Court watchers had noticed that he did not hire the usual number of clerks for next year’s term, and he had given other hints as well.
The White House has been quietly evaluating potential nominees for months. Among those rumored to be in contention for the nomination are Solicitor General Elena Kagan and several appeals court judges, including Diane Wood and Merrick Garland.
A soft-spoken Republican and former antitrust lawyer from Chicago, Justice Stevens has led liberals on a court that has become increasingly conservative. He was appointed by President Gerald Ford in December 1975 to succeed Justice William O. Douglas, who had retired the month before. He is the longest-serving current justice by more than a decade.
Before joining the Supreme Court, Justice Stevens had been an appeals court judge. He served in the Navy in World War II.
He joined the court when it included Thurgood Marshall and William J. Brennan Jr., who along with Justice Douglas had been liberal stalwarts of the Warren court era. Also serving were Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Nixon appointee who voted with the court’s conservatives on criminal justice issues but was a strong supporter of abortion rights, and Potter Stewart, the last of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s four Supreme Court appointees, who, like Justice Stevens, was a moderate Republican from the Midwest.
For most of his first two decades on the court, Justice Stevens labored in the shadows of those large figures, and was known to the public, if at all, mainly for the jaunty bow ties that were his sartorial trademark. After 1994, though, when the retirement of Justice Harry A. Blackmun made Justice Stevens the court’s senior associate, the language of his dissents started to become noticeably sharper, with a theme running through them: that the Supreme Court had lost touch with fundamental notions of fair play.
Confronted with a court far more conservative than the one he joined, Justice Stevens showed the world what his colleagues already knew: that beneath his amiable manner lay a canny strategist and master tactician, qualities he used to win victories that a simple liberal-conservative head count would appear to be impossible. A frequent dissenter even in his early years on the court, he now wrote more blunt and passionate opinions, explaining on several occasions that the nation was best served by an open airing of disagreements.
Justice Stevens’s stature as the bench’s unlikely liberal voice grew greater as the Bush administration’s policies on terrorism and detainees translated into a string of cases that came before the court, and as the court itself moved further to the right, as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. succeeded Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist in 2005 and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. took the place of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor the following year. Though he now found himself more often in the minority than any of his colleagues, Justice Stevens nevertheless helped shape the majority for a number of important decisions.
Justice Stevens’s plainspoken style has characterized the last years of his tenure. In cases involving prisoners held without charge at the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the mentally retarded on death row, his version of American justice propelled by common sense and moral clarity commanded a majority.
In perhaps the most significant case, Hamdan. v. Rumsfeld, he repudiated the Bush administration’s plan to put terrorism suspects held at Guantánamo on trial by military commissions. He concluded his 72-page majority opinion with the blunt statement that “the Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law that prevails in this jurisdiction.”
A related item speculates on who might be selected to replace Stevens, though I can't vouch for it:
NYT again wrote:
Merrick B. Garland
-57 years old
-Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
-Harvard College, 1974; Harvard Law School, 1977
A former federal prosecutor now on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Judge Garland is well regarded by Democrats and influential Republican senators like Orrin G. Hatch of Utah.
Diane P. Wood
-59 years old
-Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago
-University of Texas at Austin, 1971; University of Texas Law School, 1975
Judge Wood opposed some abortion restrictions and is respected for standing firm against strong, conservative judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She and President Obama were colleagues at the University of Chicago.
Elena Kagan
-49 years old
-Solicitor general
-Princeton, 1981; Oxford, 1983; Harvard Law School, 1986
With no judicial record, Ms. Kagan is less known. As dean at Harvard Law School, she hired conservative professors to expand academic diversity and has supported assertions of executive power.
Jennifer M. Granholm
-51 years old
-Governor of Michigan
-University of California, Berkeley, 1984; Harvard Law School, 1987
Ms. Granholm is nearing the end of her second term as the first female governor of Michigan. As governor, she has generally opposed legislation to restrict abortion and twice vetoed bans on partial-birth abortion. She was born in Canada and became a United States citizen at age 18.
Janet Napolitano
-52 years old
-Secretary of Homeland Security
-Santa Clara University, 1979; University of Virginia School of Law, 1983
A former Democratic governor in Republican-dominated Arizona, Ms. Napolitano takes pride in defying easy labels and is as strongly supportive of abortion rights as she is of the death penalty. Her prospects might be hurt by criticism that she portrayed a thwarted Christmas bombing of a Detroit-bound airline as a test that the air safety system passed.
