No, this isn’t a blog about the group that inspired Dreamgirls.
I just finished Supreme Conflict (Penguin, 2007), Jan Crawford Greenburg’s excellent account of the process that led John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Greenburg appears to have had access to justices of all ideological stripes, and she gives a very even-handed account of the politics and machinations that led to the most recent high court appointments.
I found particularly interesting her description of the contrast between Chief Justice John Roberts and Sandra Day O’Connor, the justice he was initially selected to replace:
If Bush had been looking for the anti-O’Connor, he could hardly have done better. Roberts was different from O’Connor in almost every way, and he had little patience for her approach to the law, which he saw as undisciplined, almost to the point that it bordered on irresponsible. O’Connor had become the most powerful woman in America, conservatives like Roberts believed, precisely because she lacked a defined philosophy for interpreting the Constitution or deciding cases. The justices under Rehnquist’s leadership were in constant struggle over which of their competing legal theories was the right one. But O’Connor stood alone. She took a pragmatic approach, focusing on the facts and merits of each case. She was hard to predict, and lawyers often talked about how their cases came down to whether O’Connor would be on their side. In some cases, lawyers crafted their arguments specifically for her, knowing that if they managed to get her vote, they’d win the case. Conservatives complained that she’d become powerful because she didn’t have a jurisprudence of her own. Her vote was always up for grabs.
That was not how John Roberts thought a Supreme Court justice should be. Roberts thought the focus should be on the law, not the individual judge or justice. It was like in a baseball game. Fans shouldn’t leave the game talking about how great the umpire was or how impressively he’d defined the strike zone on that particular day. They should be talking about the players and the game itself. The Supreme Court was the same. It was about the cases and the law, not how an individual justice could call the outcome. In Roberts’s view, a justice needed a consistent philosophy the same way an umpire had to have a consistent strike zone. Without it, judges could become too powerful and take over the game.
