The Unintended Consequences of the Roberts Court

I guess there’s really no way to enforce this, but the goal of any president, Republican or Democrat when a vacancy on the Supreme Court appears, should be to balance the liberals and conservatives. In that resolve, it would be entirely possible (and preferable) for a conservative president to nominate a liberal-leaning justice or vice-versa. I do not want to live in a nation that is either strongly liberal or conservative, but one that is balanced in its ideology.

That flies in the face of the Court’s history.

As long as there have been presidential appointments to the Supreme Court—and that’s as long as we’ve had a nation—the goal has been to serve the interests of the president in power. Lordy, lordy, but that has been a disgraceful act against the interests of America. We are not a predominantly liberal or conservative nation. We are as mixed in those definitions as we are in our ethnic makeup. America is a pendulum, and it swings like a pendulum—at least it should—and the Court’s duty is to keep it somewhere near the middle.

Chief Justice Roberts fired a shot across the bow of the nine members, admonishing their current conservatism and warning that they are moving away from public support.