We’re far beyond era of bipartisan comity that greeted Justice Stevens
One indisputable benefit of the wrenching political tug of war over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court has been that it has focused America’s scatterbrained attention on something really important.
After all, who gets to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court is far more consequential than other recent national preoccupations, such as the morality of “The Bachelor” Arie in dumping Becca for Lauren or the New England Patriots benefiting from underinflated footballs.
And for me, it isn’t only the Kavanaugh hearings in the U.S. Senate that have brought this into sharp focus.
In a fortunate accident of scheduling, I will be talking with retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens on Thursday in Boca Raton.
The Stevens event, run by the Institute for Learning in Retirement, had been planned for months, and it just happened to coincide with the Kavanaugh confirmation process. So while most of America has been focused on Kavanaugh, I’ve been thinking of Stevens on a parallel track.
And that has made it only more obvious to me how important a seat on the nation’s highest court can be.
Stevens was nominated to the court by President Gerald Ford in 1975 to fill a vacancy created by the retirement of William O. Douglas. Stevens was 55 years old at the time, two years older than Kavanaugh is today.
And Douglas, who himself had been appointed to the court at the age of 40 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was leaving the court as the longest-serving U.S. Supreme Court justice in American history — retaining a seat on the high court for 36 years and 211 days.
Stevens nearly lasted that long on the court. Stevens held his Supreme Court seat until he was 90 years old, stepping down in 2010, and being replaced by President Barack Obama’s nominee Elena Kagan, who was 50 at the time.
Stevens is 98 years old today, lives in Broward County and still retains an active voice on the law through books and other writings. During the aftermath of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland this year, Stevens called for a repeal of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in an op-ed piece published in The New York Times.
“Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that ‘a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.’” Stevens wrote. “Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.”
Regardless of whether you agree with Stevens, he remains a living relic of the long-forgotten, shorttermed Ford administration.
Before his death, Ford wrote that he was “prepared to allow history’s judgment of my term in office to rest (if necessary, exclusively) on my nomination 30 years ago of Justice John Paul Stevens.”
Stevens wrote some 400 majority opinions of the high court, and toward the end of his career, as the court turned more to the right, he wrote lengthy, often scathing opinions in the minority.
In the Citizens United case in 2009, the case that opened the floodgates for corporate donations in political campaigns, Stevens’ dissent went on for 86 pages.
“At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt,” Stevens wrote. “It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”
There are also some interesting parallels between Stevens’ elevation to the high court and the current times.
Stevens was a kind of Robert Mueller of his day. While working as a corporate lawyer in Illinois during the late 1960s, he was commissioned by the Illinois House of Representatives as an independent investigator to probe corruption allegations against two members of the Illinois Supreme Court.
The politically charged allegations put Stevens in a harsh light, but his fair and deft handling of the investigation was seen by both sides as fair, and after both justices resigned, President Richard Nixon appointed Stevens to the federal bench.
A few years later, after Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment, Ford put the noncontroversial Stevens on the high court, a move applauded by both Republicans and Democrats.
In a stark contrast to today, where nominees are often recruited from the political fringe of party bases, 19 days after Ford nominated Stevens, he was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
Supreme Court picks matter. What presidents do sometimes lasts only until the next election.
But Supreme Court decisions are weighted in something called “stare decisis,” a guiding principle that literally means “to stand by things decided,” which makes it harder for settled cases to be overturned by their successors.
Picking the wrong president is fixable. Picking the wrong Supreme Court justice is not.
Before his death, President Gerald Ford wrote that he was ‘prepared to allow history’s judgment of my term in office to rest (if necessary, exclusively) on my nomination 30 years ago of Justice John Paul Stevens.’
Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens will speak 2 p.m. Thursday at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Boca Raton, 2601 St. Andrews Blvd., Boca Raton. Admission is $25, with proceeds supporting the Institute for Learning in Retirement.
For more information, contact ILIR at 561-883-0999 or email at ilirincinfo@att. net