The Supreme Court: It Is All Relative

TW: I have posted on this in the past. The Supreme Court has been traditionally a conservative institution. It came up with Dred Scott and numerous reactionary rulings limiting civil rights, it greatly hindered FDR's New Deal and the Republican administrations of Reagan and the Bushes put an end to the progressiveness of the Warren Court of the 50's and 60's. Republicans get the importance of the SCOTUS, I am still not convinced Democrats do. Conservatives whine and moan using all their little codewords but at the end of the day, the SCOTUS post-Sotomayor will still be plenty conservative.

From Ezra Klein at WaPo:
"...The Supreme Court, and the legal profession in general, have moved decisively rightward since the '70s. Cass Sunstein, who clerked on the Court in 1980, explains it well:

In 1980, when I clerked at the Court, the justices were, roughly from left to right, Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, Byron White, John Paul Stevens, Lewis Powell, Potter Stewart, Warren Burger, and William Rehnquist. Believe it or not, this Court was widely thought to be conservative. But think, just for a moment, about how much would have to change in order for the Court of 2007 to look like the supposedly conservative Court of 1980.

First we would have to chop off the Court's right wing, removing Scalia and Thomas and replacing them with Marshall and Brennan. Far to the left of anyone on the Court today, Marshall and Brennan believed that the Constitution banned the death penalty in all circumstances, created a right to education, and required the government not merely to protect the right to choose but actually to fund abortions for poor women.

Next we would have to replace Kennedy with Blackmun. Blackmun was also to the left of anyone on the current Court. Fiercely protective of the right to privacy and opposed to the death penalty on constitutional grounds, Blackmun believed that the social-services agencies were constitutionally obliged to protect vulnerable children from domestic violence and that affirmative-action requirements were broadly acceptable.

Then we would have to leave Breyer, Stevens, Souter and Ginsburg essentially as they are. All of a sudden, the four would be perceived as the Court's moderates rather than its liberals, operating as a group much like White, Stevens, Powell, and Stewart...

To say the least, all this would represent a radical change in the Court's composition -- so radical that liberals cannot even fantasize about it. But this radically changed Court would be essentially identical to the supposedly conservative Court of 1980!

Here is another way to demonstrate the point. In 1980 Stevens often operated as the Court's median member; in many cases he (along with Powell) was the Justice Kennedy of that era. But Stevens is frequently described as the most liberal member of the current Court. If he qualifies for that position, it is not because of any significant change in his own approach, but because of a massive shift in the Court's center of gravity."
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/05/i_am_an_important_fact_the_sup.html