Ideology and temperment.
At the end of an otherwise very good, long piece on Justice Stevens and the evolution of the Supreme Court, Jeffrey Rosen gives some advice to liberals who want to perpetuate the Stevens model on the Court:
Identifying potential Stevenses in their 40s or 50s may not be easy: Stevens after all, hadn’t evolved into the justice he would become when he joined the court at age 55. But one way to identify future Stevenses may be to focus less on ideology than on temperament. Stevens’s successor should share his dedication to preserving the deeply rooted precedents of the past, and that dedication reflects his sensibility and character more than his personal politics. When we talked, I was especially impressed with Stevens’s character: his engagement, curiosity, combination of toughness and vision, strong internal compass and refusal to go along with the crowd, his decisiveness, analytical power, modesty (but not false modesty), devotion to the court as a steady institution and sense of wonder and gratitude for the remarkable opportunities that had come his way.
That's all very nice, but isn't the tendency for moderate liberals like Rosen to basically conflate good temperament with their own preferred ideology? I share Rosen's approval of Stevens' hyper-moderate and egalitarian jurisprudence. But that's because I'm also a moderate liberal.
Given how alien the view of the Court's movement conservatives, and the people who appointed them, are it's easy enough to see your own side as decent people holding out against conservative monsters like Scalia and flaky, sanctimonious divas like Kennedy. That's fine, but you ought to know that's what you're doing. A dedication to moderation on the Court, deference to legislative decisions when made within Constitutional and historical boundaries and a steadfast refusal to the let the Executive expand its own Constitutional and historical boundaries, are all part of Stevens' ideology, whether or not they're also evidence of a noble character. That ideology isn't terribly partisan, but only on the grounds that it was once associated with moderate Republicanism and is now associated with mainstream Democrats, something Stevens fairly obviously wishes were not true. Sure, tough but moderate ideology is probably highly correlated with tough but moderate temperament, but it's the former that matters, not the latter.
Identifying potential Stevenses in their 40s or 50s may not be easy: Stevens after all, hadn’t evolved into the justice he would become when he joined the court at age 55. But one way to identify future Stevenses may be to focus less on ideology than on temperament. Stevens’s successor should share his dedication to preserving the deeply rooted precedents of the past, and that dedication reflects his sensibility and character more than his personal politics. When we talked, I was especially impressed with Stevens’s character: his engagement, curiosity, combination of toughness and vision, strong internal compass and refusal to go along with the crowd, his decisiveness, analytical power, modesty (but not false modesty), devotion to the court as a steady institution and sense of wonder and gratitude for the remarkable opportunities that had come his way.
That's all very nice, but isn't the tendency for moderate liberals like Rosen to basically conflate good temperament with their own preferred ideology? I share Rosen's approval of Stevens' hyper-moderate and egalitarian jurisprudence. But that's because I'm also a moderate liberal.
Given how alien the view of the Court's movement conservatives, and the people who appointed them, are it's easy enough to see your own side as decent people holding out against conservative monsters like Scalia and flaky, sanctimonious divas like Kennedy. That's fine, but you ought to know that's what you're doing. A dedication to moderation on the Court, deference to legislative decisions when made within Constitutional and historical boundaries and a steadfast refusal to the let the Executive expand its own Constitutional and historical boundaries, are all part of Stevens' ideology, whether or not they're also evidence of a noble character. That ideology isn't terribly partisan, but only on the grounds that it was once associated with moderate Republicanism and is now associated with mainstream Democrats, something Stevens fairly obviously wishes were not true. Sure, tough but moderate ideology is probably highly correlated with tough but moderate temperament, but it's the former that matters, not the latter.
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