Justice Stevens, Voter ID Laws, and the Future of the Supreme Court
Hans von Spakovsky /
With the long expected retirement announcement by Justice John Paul Stevens on Friday, President Obama gets a second opportunity to shape the Supreme Court to match his very activist view of the law and the role of judges. That role, according to the President, is not to interpret the Constitution and statutes based on the time-honored principle of blind justice, but to use “empathy” to make sure that “powerful interests” are not “allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens.”
Some might believe that it would not be worth the effort of conservatives to spend much time and resources on opposing a liberal, activist nominee because Obama will simply be replacing a liberal with another liberal. But they would be wrong.
There is no doubt that Justice Stevens has taken the wrong view in a vast majority of cases for many years, pushing judicial supremacy over the other branches of government (particularly in the area of national security), imposing liberal social policy as new-found rights, and on too many occasions veering from the original meaning of the Constitution. But he has occasionally made the right decision – such as when he wrote the opinion in 2008 that upheld Indiana’s voter identification law as perfectly constitutional.