Friday, April 09, 2010

Justice Stevens Will Retire This Summer

Justice Stevens Will Retire This Summer "Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens will retire from the nation's highest court this summer, at the end of this session."

Glenn Greenwald has some thoughts on a replacement who's name has been around for a while: "When President Obama chose Sonia Sotomayor to replace David Souter, that had very little effect on the ideological balance of the Court, because Sotomayor was highly likely to vote the way Souter did in most cases. By stark contrast, replacing Stevens with Kagan (or, far less likely, with Sunstein) would shift the Court substantially to the Right on a litany of key issues (at least as much as the shift accomplished by George Bush's selection of the right-wing ideologue Sam Alito to replace the more moderate Sandra Day O'Connor). Just click on the links in the last paragraph here, detailing some of Kagan's "centrist" (i.e., highly conservative) positions on executive power, civil liberties and Terrorism for a sense of how far to the Right she would be as compared to Stevens."

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