It's probably unreasonable to expect any Supreme Court Justice to rule with Vulcan-like precision merely on the legal merits of a given case — if for no other reason than that they are (a) human, and (b) cases that get to (and are accepted by) SCOTUS are rarely so clear in their legal merits as to be obvious slam-dunks.
On the other hand, we expect and hope that the influence of politics will not be strictly partisan — GOP-appointed justices voting as John Boehner expects, Dem-appointed ones rooting for Obama. True, justices are appointed by presidents and are usually chosen because they are (or were at the time) seen as holding legal opinions in line with what the President wanted (and the Senate was willing to approve). Equally true is that justices often surprise (and disappoint) their appointers.
The thing is, in many ways, "politics" in the standard GOP vs Democrat mold isn't what the Justices are about. We can talk about "conservative" vs. "liberal," but there is often a lot of bleed-over as their judicial philosophies are along many axes, and many of them different from legislative politics. If the Justices are partisan, they tend to be less so based on our two parties than as parties of differing judicial philosophies.
The danger comes when that all seems to line up to match the partisan debate. Because the credibility of the court system is that it is based on the law — the law as seen and understood through different opinions, but still the law — not based on who the Justice in question wants to see elected as the next President (see Florida 2000). When that credibility is threatened, the Supreme Court, the court system in general, and the nation all suffer. #ddtb
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Supreme Court Seen Influenced by Politics in Health-Care Ruling
Three-quarters of Americans say the U.S. Supreme Court will be influenced by politics when it rules on the constitutionality of a health-care law signed by President Barack Obama two years ago. The se…
I do believe that once appointed, those on the SCotUS take their positions seriously enough to make an attempt to rule based on their interpretation of Constitutional Law. But quite often politics is about interpretation. If not, why would each party spend millions of dollars testing phrases, parsed word by word, to find the best language to cast their side of an argument; it comes down to how people interpret those words. So, yes, Justices were appointed because they showed a tendency or propensity to interpret in ways that align with a given party's goals at the time of the appointment.
I don't believe Florida 2000 showed anything else really — the parties in Florida had already made a mockery of the process and created the climate for any decision to be perceived as having been made based on political favoritism. The image of people holding up paper strips to the light to make out any indication of a marking of indentation is still seared into my mind as farcical. Yes, every effort needs to be made to not disenfranchise any person's participation in the political process, but at the same time people need to take that responsibility seriously enough to make sure they make their intentions clearly known so that no "that wisp of a mark means they meant that — no that crease in the paper means they meant the other" can go on after the fact. Back to interpretation of artifacts by people who are motivated to see their candidate or cause prevail.
I hope that the opinions reached and released after the Healthcare arguments are clear enough to reveal a fundamental and organic growth from the applicable Constitutional clauses. It will be interesting to see what the lines of bench questioning are and how those are responded to by the respective sides. It would appear to me that at this point the Circuit opinions that have upheld the law are the more soundly grounded, but we'll see. Should be an interesting summer!