About Bush v. Gore . . . and those wacist wepublicans . . .

In an interesting profile of likely soon-to-depart SCOTUS Justice John Paul Stevens is this Liberal reconstruction of what happened in the Court's 2000 Bush v. Gore decision. What will the Supreme Court be like without Justice John Paul Stevens? : The New Yorker:

In Bush v. Gore, Stevens framed his colleagues’ decision as an insult to the judicial role, one that could, he wrote, “only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land.” In words that became better known than anything in the collectively written majority decision, he continued:


Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.

Uh, it's probably the very essence of "rule of law" is not to change the rules in the middle of a controversy. The Left really struggles with that concept.

And another point needs correcting in the article:

After his clerkship, Stevens returned to Chicago and took a job at one of the city’s first religiously integrated law firms. Abner Mikva clerked on the Supreme Court the year after Stevens, then returned to Chicago to start a career in public life. “Those were the days when there was such a thing as a moderate Republican, and that’s what he was,” Mikva said of Stevens. “He was a pretty conservative Republican on economic issues, but he was always a great progressive on civil rights and social rights.”

Republicans as a party were certifiably more in favor of "civil rights" than Democrats.

And, near the end of the profile, my beef with Stevens comes to light:

Stevens, throughout his years on the Court, has drawn not just on history and precedent but on contemporary values and even on his own experience as a judge. According to Stevens, that approach has its origins in his brief stint as a lawyer on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee. “That was probably one of the most important parts of my education,” Stevens told me. He recalled an incident involving an antitrust law: “I remember explaining one of the tricky problems in the statute to one of the members of the committee. I got all through it, and he said, ‘Well, you know, let’s let the judges figure that one out.’ ”

What that told him was that “the legislature really works with the judges—contrary to the suggestion that the statute is a statute all by itself,” Stevens said. “There is an understanding that there are areas of interpretation that are going to have to be filled in later on, and the legislators rely on that. It’s part of the whole process. And you realize that they’re not totally separate branches of government—they’re working together.”

Whatever happened to judicial restraint (read: a proper, limited role of the judiciary) and separation of powers, not to mention textualism?