Midnight Mutterings | Ruthie and the Supremes

||| BY JACKIE BATES |||

National events this week have been so explosive I have to skip them entirely and return to the past in my fortnightly foray into talking to myself in the dark.

For example, on Halloween Day, 2020, which now seems a long time ago, if you happened to go to the library for curb pickup, you would have been greeted by easily recognizable literary personalities. You might have spent some time chatting up, from a social distance, Pippi Longstocking, for example. And there also, holding Court, looking amazingly well, considering her demise just a month before, was Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Of course I can’t reveal which librarian was dressed as the venerable, much loved and missed, RBG. (It was Holly King.)

Of course it got me thinking about something I had heard about Supreme Court Justices a long time ago, though I don’t recall the source: That some Justices who were appointed when they were established conservatives, drifted (or sometimes raced) to the left ideologically, after time on the court. Sandra Day O’Connor comes quickly to mind. Appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981 and confirmed unanimously by the Senate, she was the first woman Justice on the Supreme Court. She moved to the center, but voted several times in support liberal causes, upholding Roe v Wade, for example. By her retirement in 2006, O’Connor had been joined by RBG in in 1993, appointed by Bill Clinton. Neither of these women was able to get paid work as attorneys upon graduation, and both put in stints as professors of law in prestigious universities. There is some irony in their being chosen to train practitioners in professions they could work in (immediately) themselves.

Anthony Kennedy, known along with O’Connor as a ‘swing’ voter, was also nominated by Ronald Reagan. Then there’s David Souter, a known conservative, appointed by George HW Bush in 1990. He surprised everyone by moving quickly to the ideological center, then to the decided left. One of his earliest observations was about how ‘some human life is going to be changed by what we do’ [in court].

Oddly, many of the other eventually liberal Justices were nominated by Republican presidents, including Earl Warren, William Brennan, Henry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens. Warren Burger was nominated by Richard Nixon. Even William Rehnquist, another strong conservative choice by Ronald Reagan, supported the Miranda warning, changing arrest practices forever.

Current Chief Justice John Roberts, nominated by George W. Bush, has ‘disappointed’ President Trump by voting to uphold the Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010 in President Barack Obama’s first term. There are certainly conservative Justices who have remained strictly conservative throughout their tenure, like Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Antonin Scalia. However, in contrast to some conservatives leaning liberal, there is no Justice that I know of who, originally liberal, eventually leaned to the right.

One article I read suggested that perhaps the change in ideology is due to age. That people become more liberal as they get older. Certainly, that has not been my observation in my limited experience, and I know of no studies that support that hypothesis. What I think is that the shift may come from the nature of the job. That serving on the Supreme Court of
the United States is a humbling, weighty task. It may be the nature of the job, of making decisions that profoundly affect lives, most often lives of people less fortunate than themselves, that makes Justices reassess.

I’ll not likely live to see what eventually happens with Justice Brett Kavanaugh, but it will be interesting to watch him as long as I can.