Politically charged clerks

[groovedaddy]

As Adam Liptak recently reported in The Times, Supreme Court justices are increasingly choosing clerks who reflect and reinforce their political leanings, the more conservative justices especially but also the more liberal. Just as striking, perhaps, is that this practice isn’t sparking many objections in Washington.

A half-century ago, the threat that politically minded clerks might exercise undue influence on justices was the focus of considerable alarm — at least by conservatives. In a 1957 essay in U.S. News & World Report, William Rehnquist (then a recent clerk, later the chief justice) wrote that “a majority of the clerks I knew” showed “extreme solicitude for the claims of Communists and other criminal defendants.” He suggested that clerks’ biases were skewing which cases the court decided to hear.

A few months later, Senator John Stennis, a conservative Democrat from Mississippi, quoted extensively from the Rehnquist article in a speech on the floor and exhorted Congress to consider imposing hiring standards for clerks to ensure their competence and lack of bias. He urged his colleagues to “determine whether or not Senate confirmation should be required for these positions of ever-increasing importance and influence.”

That declaration stemmed from a charge by a single clerk. The evidence today about political polarization in the hiring of clerks and about its impact on the outcome of cases is a lot more extensive and worrisome.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/opinion/22wed3.html?ref=opinion