NYT: In Battle to Pick Next Justice, Right Says, Avoid a Kennedy

[kskiska]

WASHINGTON, June 26 - When Anthony M. Kennedy was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987, he took the place of a fallen conservative icon, Robert H. Bork, whose defeat in a Senate conflagration still shapes judicial politics. Sunny while Mr. Bork emanated gloom, clean-shaven while Mr. Bork was bearded, Justice Kennedy was above all philosophically undefined while Mr. Bork's conservatism was chiseled.

But for the next few years, Justice Kennedy sided so reliably with the court's right flank that relieved conservatives proclaimed him an ally: "Bork without the beard."

No one calls him that now. Instead, some notable conservatives are calling for his impeachment. For more than a decade, Justice Kennedy has infuriated the right, writing decisions in cases that struck down prayer at public school graduations, upheld abortion rights, gave constitutional protections to pornography and gay sex and banned the death penalty for juveniles.

(snip)

"It's hard to pick the right people in the sense of those who won't change, because there aren't that many of them," Mr. Bork said. "And if you do identify somebody who believes in the original principles of the Constitution, then the other side can see it too and will put up a bitter fight. So you tend to get people who are wishy-washy, or who are unknown, and those people tend to drift to the left in response to elite opinion."

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http://nytimes.com/2005/06/27/politics/27kennedy.html?ei=5094&en=df2b06df42ec9636&hp=&ex=1119844800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print

[whalerider55]

1. remember...

that souter was recommended by John Sununu... sometimes, people reach the court and they grow. sometimes they reach the court and they stay the same. and sometimes, they shrink.

whalerider

[kskiska]

2. Maybe Kennedy should be Chief Justice

Theories of his defection flourished. He had been manipulated by law clerks, seduced by elites. He had misled the right all along. Justice Kennedy later offered his own view in a lecture to a law school class. As reported by Jeffrey Rosen in The New Yorker, his "eyes filled with tears," as he explained his moral opposition to abortion, but he said he could not impose personal views.