His belief in the power of facts was out of step in a counterfactual age.
By Chris Conway Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
If the country wasn't divided enough, it now faces another battle over a Supreme Court nominee. Justice Stephen Breyer plans to step down after nearly 28 years on the court, second only to Justice Clarence Thomas in tenure. |
But his three-day confirmation hearing was nothing like the combative one endured by Justice Thomas, who called it a "high-tech lynching." Instead, Justice Breyer's appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee was, in the words of a New York Times headline at the time, "dull." |
Dull turned out to be good for the federal appeals court judge and former Harvard Law professor. He took his seat on the court after the Senate confirmed him by what seems like an unheard-of affirmation today: 87 to 9. |
Yet Justice Breyer was anything but dull. As Linda Greenhouse writes in a guest essay this week, beneath his cool demeanor was a passion stirred by his clerkship as a young lawyer on Earl Warren's Supreme Court. It was a court, she writes, "that understood the Constitution as an engine of progress." |
As his years as a justice on the court proceeded, Greenhouse writes that he ended up as the "quintessential Enlightenment man in an increasingly unenlightened era at the court." Moreover, he found himself recently being urged by the left, at the age of 83, to retire lest the Senate fall into the hands of Republicans this fall and torpedo the chance that he would be replaced by a liberal or even a moderate on a court that has become increasingly conservative. |
So he is leaving so someone younger can carry on where he is leaving off. |
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