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Originally Posted by RC20
What I respect is a reasoning that has a well founded logical is not twisted into a pretzel no matter what my view.
I detested Miranda at the time, but I could see the reasoning and as time has passed and more and more supporting evidence of police and prosecutors willing to convict someone just to convict - its become clear it was a stain on our values.
Citizens Dis-United? Like a lot of rulings, there is no logical basis let alone any mention in the Constitution of that so called right (but like Dred Scott it is the law of the land now)
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The logic of the court in the Citizens United decision was prominent. The 1st Am. doesn't permit Congress to outlaw some kinds of speech based on the content and identity of the speaker. There is no pretzel making in taking "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech" to strike part of McCain-Feingold that did precisely that.
Kaplan's thesis seems simple, but also misguided. Of course we can imagine how a justice with a well and publicly developed constitutional philosophy may land on any specific issue, but that can just mean that the philosophy is sufficiently coherent. Reducing that to how a justice would vote based on which president appointed him is thin on insight. Was Scalia such a defender of the rights of criminal defendants because that was Ronald Reagan's burning passion? Did Thomas write the minority in a MJ prosecution because RWR loved weed?
Kaplan posits Bush v. Gore as an example of the problem of political intervention by the court. He doesn't note that the decision was 7-2, and that it was the FL Sup Ct who wrote a howler of a decision that departed from FL election law, the Gore campaign having limited a recount to counties it selected. It's hard to read Kaplan's complaint about a noble past when the political independence of the court cold be taken for granted without thinking of the Court's capitulation to extensive federal regulation of
intrastate commerce. The irony of Kaplan's complaint about political intervention from the court is that it is a political thesis itself, not a jurisprudential one.
I understand not liking the way a case is decided. I note that simple generalizations about why a justice votes one way or the other don't always survive scrutiny.