Good Riddance, Justice Kennedy

[Ubiquitous]

While it is true that Justice Anthony Kennedy was a disappointment
to conservatives, the observation misses the point. Kennedy did not
owe conservatives decisions that they liked. What all Americans
deserved from him was the conscientious application of the law. That
they did not get it is the true indictment of his time on the
Supreme Court.

Again and again, Kennedy made rulings that aggrandized the power of
the Court and of himself as its swing justice. No justice, right or
left, was more willing to substitute his judgment for that of
elected officials and voters. No justice was less willing to tie
himself down to clear rules or a legal philosophy that would
constrain him in future cases, let alone rules or a philosophy that
bore a plausible relation to the Constitution. We moved toward a
system of government no Founder intended, in which his whim
determined policy on a vast range of issues.

Some of Kennedy’s critics said that Kennedy had set himself up as
our “philosopher king,” but the term suggests a level of
sophistication in thought that he did not evidence. The trademark of
a Kennedy opinion was a verbal effusion that gestured toward
profundity without overcoming confusion. Most notoriously, he used
an abortion case to opine that “at the heart of liberty is the right
to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the
universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Nobody who ratified the
Constitution or its relevant amendments thought in such terms. Nor
would any of it be a legal defense against a parking ticket.

Kennedy’s lack of real guiding principles had the happy consequence
that he sometimes voted for the right legal outcome — and even
sometimes concurred in opinions that reached the right outcome for
the right reasons. But we hope that his successor will have a much
stronger sense of what fidelity to the law requires. And any
plausible Trump nominee will be an improvement.

[#BeamMeUpScotty]

Post by Ubiquitous
While it is true that Justice Anthony Kennedy was a disappointment
to conservatives, the observation misses the point. Kennedy did not
owe conservatives decisions that they liked.

But he did owe us all competent decisions and he failed to do that by
trying to be a fence sitter when in fact the logic dictated that he NOT
sit the fence but he impishly took the Liberals feelings as being a
reason to side with the LEFT so that he would be in the center rather
than correct and logical.

Being in the center is NOT being correct, it's a concision that
undermined logic and reality and being correct.