High court and low politics: Part III

While there is a tendency to label judges “liberal” or “conservative” — and the labels may fit, even if somewhat loosely — the real puzzle are judges who start out one way and move the other way over time.

In the population at large, and even among the intelligentsia, the usual movement over the years has been from left to right. The phrase “radical at 20 and conservative at 40” has been true enough, often enough, to become a cliche.

Most of the leading conservative intellectuals were at least liberal, and often radical, in their youth. That includes Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and the whole neoconservative movement. In politics, the leading conservative figure of the 20th century — Ronald Reagan — was a liberal in his early years.

On the United States Supreme Court, however, the movement has been in the opposite direction.

In an outstanding recently published book titled “Supreme Conflict,” author Jan Crawford Greenburg traces systematically the leftward movement of Supreme Court justices who were initially part of the conservative wing of that court.

The late Justice Harry Blackmun began his career on the high court by voting with his fellow Minnesotan, conservative Chief Justice Warren Burger, so consistently that the media called them the “Minnesota Twins.”

Over the years, however, Blackmun moved steadily leftward and established as his judicial legacy the decision in Roe v. Wade that created a “constitutional right” to abortion out of thin air.

Justice Anthony Kennedy likewise began his tenure on the Supreme Court by voting “with Scalia and Rehnquist more than with any other justice,” as noted in “Supreme Conflict.” The liberal media savaged him as an enemy of civil rights.

Years ago, a judge who had served with Anthony Kennedy, when both were judges in California, warned at a social gathering that Justice Kennedy “is not a strong person.”

Others warned against Justice Kennedy in Washington, as detailed in “Supreme Conflict,” but the Reagan administration went ahead and nominated him anyway. Justice Kennedy’s record on the Supreme Court fully justified all these misgivings.

In the face of withering criticism, Justice Kennedy began moving to the left — not as far left as Blackmun but far enough for some of his later decisions to contradict some of his earlier decisions. He was now lauded in the media as a “centrist,” like Sandra Day O’Connor.

Former Justice O’Connor also began her career voting with the high court’s most conservative member at that time — William Rehnquist — more than four-fifths of the time. But she too moved leftward over the years, often providing the fifth vote needed by the court’s liberal justices to prevail. She too was now lauded in the media.

Although Supreme Court justices have lifetime tenure, precisely to give them independence, nothing can give anyone the backbone and character to stand up to criticism or to resist the blandishments of flattery and lionizing.

All the pressures are to move to the left, in accordance with the views of the liberal media and the liberal professors who dominate the law schools.

Judges who stick to the Constitution as it was written and resist pressures to enact the agenda of the left from the bench will be depicted as narrow, dull, perhaps even stupid or morally lacking. But those who drift with the leftward tide can count on being portrayed as compassionate, brilliant or even profound.

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