United Liberty

Justice John Paul Stevens, who will turn 90 next month and has been on the Supreme Court since 1975, discussed his retirement plans, sort of, in the latest issue of The New Yorker:

How long will Stevens remain on the Court? Good genes (one of his older brothers practiced law until he was ninety-one), a happy home, plenty of exercise, and even more luck could allow Stevens to keep up the fight into his tenth decade. Last December, he had lunch with Peter Isakoff, a Washington lawyer who was one of his early Supreme Court law clerks. “He had just played tennis that morning—singles!—and I was just kind of amazed,” Isakoff recalled. “And so I asked him, ‘Do you still run?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Well, how else are you going to get to the ball?’ ”

With the election of Barack Obama, the question of Stevens’s retirement has become more pressing. Even though Stevens was appointed by a Republican President, many assume that he would never willingly have turned his seat over to George W. Bush. I asked Stevens about his plans.

“Well, I still have my options open,” he said. “When I decided to just hire one clerk, three of my four clerks last year said they’d work for me next year if I wanted them to. So I have my options still. And then I’ll have to decide soon.” On March 8th, he told me that he would make up his mind in about a month.

(…)

“You can say I will retire within the next three years. I’m sure of that.”

My guess is that it will happen sooner rather than later, possibly this year.

Interestingly, Stevens also weighs in, sort of, on the continuing war of words between the White House and Chief Justice Roberts over the State of the Union:

At a Q&A someone asked Chief Justice Roberts how he felt about the President making comments about a recent decision that the court made during the State of the Union.  Roberts had an excellent answer:

Over at SCOTUS Blog, Matt Sundquist notes that the polling, even surveys by mainstream news, in the wake of the Citizens United decision is skewed to present a negative view of the ruling:

Americans oppose the Court’s recent decision in Citizens United by a margin of nearly two to one (sixty-four to twenty-seven percent), according to a poll conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and McKinnon Media on behalf of Common Cause, Change Congress, and the Public Campaign Action Fund.  Another poll, by ABC News and the Washington Post, recently found that eighty percent of Americans oppose the Citizens ruling, with sixty-five percent “strongly” opposing it.  Both polls also found that a broad majority of voters favor some type of congressional response to the decision.  These findings have been widely reported, with some proponents of reform relying on them to call for a congressional response to the Citizens decision.

George Will explains the importance of incorporating the Second Amendment in the McDonald v. Chicago case through the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment:

To the drafters of the 14th Amendment, the phrase “privileges or immunities” was synonymous with “basic civil rights.” But in 1873, the court held that only some of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights restrict states by being “incorporated” into the 14th Amendment’s “due process” clause.

Since 1897, the court has held, with no discernible principle, that some rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are sufficiently fundamental to be “incorporated” but others are not. This doctrine bears the oxymoronic name “substantive due process.” Substance is what process questions are not about.

If the court now “incorporates” the Second Amendment right via the “due process” guarantee, that will be progress because it will enlarge the sphere of protected liberty. And even Justice Antonin Scalia, who recognizes that “substantive due process” is intellectual applesauce, thinks it is too late to repudiate 137 years of the stuff. Still, three points argue for using the “privileges or immunities” scythe against the two gun ordinances.

First, protecting the individual’s right to keep and bear arms for self-defense was frequently mentioned by those who drafted and ratified the 14th Amendment, the purpose of which was to protect former slaves and their advocates from being disarmed by state and local governments determined to assault their security and limit their autonomy.

Some “progressives” are pushing President Barack Obama to pack the Supreme Court in the wake of the Citizens United decision:

The court’s recent controversial decision equating corporations with individuals turned an already overly money-influenced campaign system into a veritable free-for-all of propaganda for corporate and vested interests. It was met with criticism by most legal scholars, praised only by corporate mouthpieces.

Even Barack “Can’t We All Get Along?” Obama criticized the decision in his State of the Union speech. A lot of good that will do. The court has four hard-liners who are against what Obama strives for, and a so-called swing voter, Anthony Kennedy, who votes with them in the big cases.
[…]
Obama can give himself a fighting chance by changing the rules of the game, just as they were changed for other presidents in the 1800s. He should forget bipartisanship and work with congressional Democrats to name three new justices to the court to meet the challenges he faces.

It would be a tumultuous fight, but it would be for a change we could believe in.

If anything this serves as evidence that the left has no idea what they are talking about when it comes to the Citizens United decision. Corporations are entities composed of individuals, who are entitled to speech protections, no different than labor unions. And God knows the left would never do anything to silence their precious labor unions.