The Humane Legacy of John Paul Stevens

Jeffrey Toobin: “It wasn’t just the Republican Party that evolved during Stevens’s thirty-four years on the Court (the third-longest tenure in history). Stevens moved left on some issues, especially the death penalty, which he came to see as an institution fatally at variance with the nation’s legal traditions. (Blackmun had reached the same conclusion, a few years earlier.) Still, it’s clear that the Republican Party changed more than Stevens did. The party of Donald Trump—and of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, his appointees to the Court—shares almost nothing with the humane ideological home of John Paul Stevens.”

“Trump is not a deep thinker about legal issues, but he understood politics well enough to know that he could prove himself to the right-wing base of his adopted party by embracing its extremist agenda for the Supreme Court. This commitment remains the core of his appeal to his party. In fact if not in words, Trump and his appointees are dedicated to overturning virtually everything that Stevens stood for as a Justice: equal rights for women, including the right to choose abortion; civil rights for gay people and for racial minorities, especially concerning the right to vote; a sensible understanding of the right to regulate guns under the Second Amendment (which Stevens, in retirement, called for repealing); separation of church and state; reasonable limits on the power of the Presidency.”