The assigned topic: David Souter’s resignation

From what I read the guy actually believed in justice. He became disillusioned at the start of bush jr’s time and as soon as the next liberal is in he retires having a good idea the kind of person that will come into power.

To me it seems one of the most profound choices a president gets to make is who they appoint to the supreme court. Everyone
focuses on who will be picked and what they have done but what I’ve never heard talked about is why a person picks when they pick to retire. Did he become ill or just get tired of it or did he wait until someone who he liked would make the pick to drop out of the game?

I don’t have much to say about this except to agree that the appointment of a Supreme Court Judge is a long-lasting and powerful choice a president gets to make. Ronald Reagan, for example, appointed Antonin Scalia in 1986 and by virtue of that, Reagan’s values are still influencing the U.S.

Of course there are surprises. The Republican president Gerald Ford appointed John Paul Stevens in 1975. There is delightful irony there, because Stevens was appointed to replace William Douglas, who Ford had tried to have impeached from the bench. Douglas was a pretty strong advocate of individual rights as well as an environmentalist; Ford did not like him and Stevens was chosen, at least largely, because he was a Republican. I mean his Segal-Cover score is 0.250 – pretty deeply conservative. But there were surprises coming. In 1992, for example, he upheld Roe vs Wade in Planned Parenthood vs Casey. And then in 2007 he authored an opinion finding that the EPA does have the authority to regulate carbon dioxide. Douglas would have been proud.
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