<![CDATA[law.com – Article:
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said Tuesday in Chicago that rulings on difficult subjects like gay rights and the death penalty have left courts vulnerable to political attacks that are threatening judicial independence.
Breyer urged lawyers to help educate people about court responsibility to be an independent decision-maker.
“If you say seven or eight or nine members of the Supreme Court feel there’s a problem … you’re right,” he told the American Bar Association. “It’s this edge on a lot of issues.”
Following a liberal era, which was ironically focused and consummated by Earl Warren, a Republican appointee, the Supreme Court has become the target of neoconservative investment—in getting justices placed on the court and influencing debates within the court—in order to reverse the rulings of the past 50 years.
Unfortunately for the neocons, the rulings of the middle and late 20th Century do reflect the American mainstream and were not the result of politicking by liberals. To insist that justices appointed today reflect a strictly neocon fundamentalist position is at odds with longstanding complaints of judicial activism the Right has used to attack Democratic-appointed judges because those views are held by a small minority of the population.
The typical American is flexible and, basically, liberal—believing in an individual’s right to choose their course on topics of controversy rather than allowing the state to dictate the limits of choice in opinion, birth, death and everything else that defines our lives—and not interested in living in a society made by a Christian fundamentalism.
Technorati Tags: Bush, neocon, Roberts, SupremeCourt
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