How will the Court change with Stevens gone?<\/p>\n
More than with the Souter-Sotomayor switch which was predicted to be and has so far proven to be an even swap.<\/p>\n
Stevens is the liberal leader of the Court. If not in legal thinking then certainly in leadership\/seniority and ability to cull together a five vote majority. It is Stevens who is often credited with bringing Justice Anthony Kennedy to the liberal side in the close 5-4 cases. It is unlikely that a new justice will have that pull.<\/p>\n
HOWEVER, the loss of Stevens will put Kennedy in a position of power to craft his own five member majority. Under Court protocol the Chief Justice has the power to assign opinions when he is in the majority. The longest tenured Associate Justice has that power when the Chief Justice is in the minority. Stevens has been in that position for nearly two decades. It will now fall to Justice Antonin Scalia. But since Chief Justice John Roberts and Scalia are often on the same side and unlikely to diverge in the future, Kennedy as next in line has the power to control the outcome of cases unlike ever before. As the notorious swing vote on the Court Kennedy can now effectively hold each side hostage for the outcome he desires. The question is which side will most often bend to what Kennedy demands? My prediction is that Kennedy who is more often than not (by about 2-1) with the conservatives on the close cases will now be leading more rulings with the liberals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How will the Court change with Stevens gone? More than with the Souter-Sotomayor switch which was predicted to be and has so far proven to be an even swap. Stevens is the liberal leader of the Court. If not in legal thinking then certainly in leadership\/seniority and ability to cull together a five vote majority. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5152,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-521854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5152"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521854\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}