Breaking SCOTUS News: Souter to retire
Looks like Supreme Court Justice David Souter is going to retire. Wowza. Thoughts?
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Well, we won't have to worry about any more comments like this one during the oral arguments for the strip-search case of that 13 yr old:
"My thought process is I would rather have the kid embarrassed by a strip search, if we can't find anything short of that, than to have some other kids dead because the stuff is distributed at lunchtime and things go awry."
But he was an abortion rights supporter. Why can't one of the crappy justices go? Scalia, Thomas...boo.
Maybe he'll be replaced by a women and there will be even fewer insensitive comments in cases involving strip searching 13 yr old girls.
That's too bad it isn't someone else retiring though. Souter was one of the good ones! Usually.
who else is happy mccain isn't president right now??? looking forward to obama's first SC appointment..
Damn straight!!!!!VERY happy we have no elephant prezes right now!!
Hopefully plans to retire means retire after they seat Franken.
We should be pretty safe on this front. The MN Supreme Court will hear oral arguments for the Franken-Coleman dispute on June 1st, and it shouldn't take them too long to decide in Franken's favor (the decision being appealed was written anticipating Coleman's arguments and shooting them down in advance). Souter will stick around through the end of the SCOTUS term, which goes into June, with no real need for the replacement to be confirmed until later in the summer. Franken should be seated in time for at least some of the confirmation hearings, as well as the vote.
thanks for 18 years of fighting the good fight, justice souter. now, if you could take justices scalia, thomas, and alito with you, i'd be very much obliged.
i'm pretty confident his replacement will be good.
He's been fairly liberal over the years, and now sides with Ginsburg more than anyone else does. I am definitely glad that Obama will get to name a replacement (anyone else think Souter waited to hear the outcome of the election?), but I certainly hope his vetting process has improved (please, no more back tax problems!). We need a very strong candidate nominated, preferably not another white male.
And I agree, I'd be awfully glad to see Scalia or Thomas go. I was so disappointed in O'Connor's retirement timing, though I can understand it.
Ginsburg still pushing through though! A soldier!I think if there were more women and/ or more pro-feminsit male judges on court she would retire.
I agree those are some of the main reasons that Ginsburg is staying on. She has clearly and repeatedly expressed her frustration with the "boy's club" that the other 8 justices sometimes form. She has come to be a role model, I think, both in terms of her ideals and her legal thinking.
This is huge, because Obama may get to fill three Supreme Court seats (or, even, perhaps four).
After all, Souter is right in the middle age wise (I believe Scalia, Ginsburg, Breyer and Stevens) are all older.
Ginsburg and Stevens both look like they may leave the court (not to sound insensitive; they are great people and I love reading their decisions) in the next few years, and Obama may get to replace them with young liberals who can help keep articulate the liberal position.
Scalia is getting older, too, and he's not as healthy as he used to be (and it shows, in his decisions; especially on the torture issue, which was awful). That seat could very well open up, too, and the real Judicial voice for the conservatives (or, at least, the most articulate and barbed one) could end up replaced with a pro-choicer.
It's an interesting time to be alive.
Actually Ginsburg and Stevens are the only Justices that are older than Souter.
Unfortunately I don't see Scalia retiring anytime soon (unless something very bad happens with his health). He's definitely going want to hang on as long as possible seeing that there's a Democrat in office. Which sucks because he's the one Justice I really really want to go ASAP.
Scalia, Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg, and Kennedy are all older than Souter
Okay, then the article I read about it this morning was wrong. Maybe they meant the only liberal judges that were older?
Either way, I stand by what I said about Scalia, he's not going anywhere.
If Obama has a short list, now is the time to put up his most progressive choice. If we lose seats in 2010, he might need to placate with a slightly more moderate nominee -- now is the time to keep the momentum up, and give us someone in the mode of a Brennan...
From the linked page: "Some of the names that have been circulating include recently confirmed Solicitor General Elena Kagan; U.S. Appeals Court Judges Sonya Sotomayor, Kim McLane Wardlaw, Sandra Lea Lynch and Diane Pamela Wood; and Leah Ward Sears, chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court. Men who have been mentioned as potential nominees include Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein and U.S. District Judge Ruben Castillo of Chicago."
Could someone more versed in SCOTUS-watching than I tell me how good/accurate this is? Thank you in advance.
Can I ask a question here - why does the blogosphere call it "SCOTUS"?
I know it's the Secret Service radio callsign for "Supreme Court of the United States" - but that's not necessarily a good reason to use it as the common term for the court!
Is it that hard to type "Supreme Court" - yeah, I know it's 7 characters space 5 characters instead of 6 characthers, but "Supreme Court" just sounds nicer.