Stevens, John Paul Justice
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merri ok
90-page dissent to Citizens United. --> primary
nom by Ford
5-4
THE dissenting opinion by Justice Stevens[39] was joined by Justice Ginsburg, Justice :{Breyer, and Justice Sotomayor}:
Majority
Kennedy, joined by Roberts(bush 43 2005], Scalia [RR 1986 over bork?], Alito; Thomas(all but Part IV); Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor (Part IV)
Concurrence
Roberts, joined by Alito
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[### No Time To Wait for the Effects of Citizens United
Brennan Center for Justice
https://www.brennancenter.org › analysis-opinion › n...](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/no-time-wait-effects-citizens-united)
As Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens predicted in his eloquent dissent on the Citizens United case, “[w]hen citizens turn on their televisions and ...
[### Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
Britannica
https://www.britannica.com › Dissenting-opinion](https://www.britannica.com/event/Citizens-United-v-Federal-Election-Commission/Dissenting-opinion)
Jan 2, 2024 — Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission - Campaign Finance, Dissent, Money: In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the ...
[### John Paul Stevens Was Right About Citizens United
The Intercept
https://theintercept.com › 2019/07/18 › john-paul-stev...](https://theintercept.com/2019/07/18/john-paul-stevens-was-right-citizens-united-opened-the-door-to-foreign-money-in-u-s-elections/)
Jul 18, 2019 — ... dissent in the infamous case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. “Justice Stevens clearly saw what most people know, that ...
[### Justice Stevens's Dissent in Citizens United Lives On!
Wisconsin Democracy Campaign
https://www.wisdc.org › news › commentary › 6381-j...](https://www.wisdc.org/news/commentary/6381-justice-stevens-s-dissent-in-citizens-united-lives-on)
Jul 17, 2019 — July 17, 2019 by Matthew Rothschild, Executive Director The death of Justice John Paul Stevens is a blow to all those who valued his clarion ...
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https://www.ecowatch.com/kyrsten-sinema-environment-climate-change-2619538159.html
thom h
when Bobby Kennedy went after organized crime in the early 1960s, one of the things he learned was that the Mafia had a series of rituals new members went through to declare their loyalty and promise they'd never turn away from their new benefactors. Once in, they'd be showered with money and protection, but they could never leave and even facedserious problems if they betrayed the syndicate.}:
Which brings us to the story of Kyrsten Sinema.
For a republican democracy to actually work, average citizens with a passion for making their country better must be able to run for public office without needing wealthy or powerful patrons; this is a concept thatdates back to Aristotle's rantson the topic. And Sinema was, in the beginning, just that sort of person. But I'm getting ahead of myself…
After the Nixon and Agnew bribery scandals were fully revealed with a series of congressional investigations leading to Nixon's resignation in 1974, Congress passed and President Jerry Ford signed into law a series of "good government" laws that provided for public funding of elections and strictly limited the role of big money in campaigns.
Just like the 1/6 attack on the Capitol produced a "select" committee to investigate the anti-democracy crimes of Donald Trump and his cronies, Congress authorized the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities to look into Nixon's abuses and make recommendations.
The committee's 100-page report documented how Nixon had taken bribes (most notably $400,000 from ITT to squash an antitrust lawsuit); used "dark" money from wealthy friends and corporations to set up astroturf "citizens committees" (an early version of the Tea Party) to make it appear he had widespread support among the American public; and used off-the-books money to both support loyal Republican politicians whose help he needed as well as to pay for his "opposition research" surveillance which included the Watergate break-in of the DNC's headquarters.
In response to the report, Congress passed an exhaustive set of new laws and regulations, most significantly creating from scratch the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), outlawing secret donations to politicians while providing for public funding of federal elections to diminish the power of big money. (Jimmy Carter was the only presidential candidate to win using such public funding.)
Over the years since, conservatives on the Supreme Court have repeatedly gutted provisions of the 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), most famously in 2010 with their notorious Citizens United decision,
with that stroke, over the loud objections of the four "liberals" on the Court, corporations were absolutely deemed as "persons" with full constitutional rights, and billionaires or corporations pouring massive amounts of money into campaign coffers was changed from "bribery and political corruption" to an exercise of the constitutionally-protected "right of free speech."
Into this milieu stepped Kyrsten Sinema, running from a seat in the Arizona Senate for the US House of Representatives in 2012 as an "out" bisexual and political progressive. The campaign quickly turned ugly.
Following the Citizens United script, the Republican she confronted in that race (Vernon Parker) used corporate and billionaire money to carpet-bomb their district airwaves with ads calling her "a radical left-wing activist promoting hatred toward our country, our allies, and our families" and warning people that she "engaged in pagan rituals.
[vid]
the district was heavily Democratic (Obama handily won it that year) but the race was close enough that it took six full days for the AP to call it for Sinema. And that, apparently, was when she decided that if you can only barely beat them, you'd damn well better join them.
Sinema quickly joined other Democrats who'd followed the Citizens United path to the flashing neon lights of big money, joining the so-called "Problem Solvers" caucus that owes its existence in part to the Wall Street-funded front group "No Labels."
Quietly and without fanfare, she began voting with Republicans and the corporate- and billionaire-owned Democrats, supporting efforts to deregulate big banks, "reform" Social Security and Medicare, and make it harder to for government to protect regular investors or even buyers of used cars from being ripped off.
She voted with the Chamber 77 percent of the time in her first term; in return, political networks run by rightwing billionaires and the US Chamber of Commerce showered her with support. In her first re-election race, in 2014, she was one of only five democrats endorsed by the notoriously rightwing Chamber.
She'd proved herself as a "made woman," just like the old mafiosi documented by RFK in the 1960s, willing to do whatever it takes, compromise whatever principles she espoused, to get into and stay in the good graces of the large and well-funded rightwing syndicates unleashed by Citizens United.
So it should surprise precisely nobody that Sinema is parroting the Chamber's and the billionaire network's line that President Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan is too generous in helping and protecting average Americans and too punitive in taxing the morbidly rich. After all, once you're in, you leave at your own considerable peril, even when 70 percent of your state's voters want the bill to pass.
And this is a genuine crisis for America because if President Biden is frustrated in his attempt to pass his Build Back Better legislation (that is overwhelmingly supported by Americans across the political spectrum) — all because business groups, giant corporations and rightwing billionaires are asserting ownership over their two "made" senators — there's a very good chance that today's cynicism and political violence is just a preview of the rest of the decade.
But this isn't as much a story about Sinema as it is about today's larger political dysfunction for which she's become, along with Joe Manchin, a poster child.
Increasingly, because of the Supreme Court's betrayal of American values, it's become impossible for people like the younger Sinema to rise from social worker to the United States Senate without big money behind them. Our media is absolutely unwilling to call this what even Andrew Jackson would have labeled it: political corruption. But that's what it is and it's eating away at our republic like a metastasized cancer.
A guest on Brian Stelter's CNN program yesterday pointed out that there are today more autocracies in the world than democracies and, generally, democracies are on the decline. This corruption of everyday politics by the rich and powerful is how democracies begin the shift to autocracy or oligarchy, as I document in gruesome detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class.
While the naked corruption of Sinema and Joe Manchin is a source of outrage for Democrats across America, what's far more important is that it reveals how deep the rot of money in American politics has gone, thanks entirely to a corrupted Supreme Court.
In Justice Stevens' dissent in Citizens United, he pointed out that corporations in their modern form didn't even exist when the Constitution was written in 1787 and got its first ten amendments in 1791, including the First which protects free speech.
"All general business corporation statues appear to date from well after 1800," Stevens pointed out to his conservative colleagues on the Court. "The Framers thus took it as a given that corporations could be comprehensively regulated in the service of the public welfare. Unlike our colleagues, they had little trouble distinguishing corporations from human beings, and when they constitutionalized the right to free speech in the First Amendment, it was the free speech of individual Americans they had in mind.
"The fact that corporations are different from human beings might seem to need no elaboration, except that the majority opinion almost completely elides it…. Unlike natural persons, corporations have 'limited liability' for their owners and managers, 'perpetual life,' separation of ownership and control, 'and favorable treatment of the accumulation of assets….' Unlike voters in U.S. elections, corporations may be foreign controlled."
Noting that corporations "inescapably structure the life of every citizen," Stevens continued: "It might be added that corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their 'personhood' often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of 'We the People' by whom and for whom our Constitution was established."
Even worse than the short-term effect of a corporation's dominating an election or a ballot initiative, Stevens said (as if he had a time machine to look at us now),was the fact that corporations corrupting politics would, inevitably, cause average working Americans — the 95 percent who make less than $100,000 a year — to conclude that their "democracy" is now rigged.
The result, Stevens wrote, is that average people would simply stop participating in politics, stop being informed about politics, and stop voting…or become angry and cynical. Our democracy, he suggested, would be immeasurably damaged and ultimately vulnerable to corporate-supported demagogues and oligarchs. Our constitutional republic, ifCitizens United stands, could wither and could die.
"In addition to this immediate drowning out of noncorporate voices," Stevens wrote in 2010, "there may be deleterious effects that follow soon thereafter. Corporate 'domination' of electioneering can generate the impression that corporations dominate our democracy.
"When citizens turn on their televisions and radios before an election and hear only corporate electioneering, they may lose faith in their capacity, as citizens, to influence public policy.A Government captured by corporate interests, they may come to believe, will be neither responsive to their needs nor willing to give their views a fair hearing.
"The predictable result is cynicism and disenchantment: an increased perception that large spenders 'call the tune' and a reduced 'willingness of voters to take part in democratic governance.' To the extent that corporations are allowed to exert undue influence in electoral races, the speech of the eventual winners of those races may also be chilled." (Emphasis mine)
As if he were looking at Kyrsten Sinema facing a tough choice about her own political survival leading up to the 2014 election, Stevens added:
"Politicians who fear that a certain corporation can make or break their reelection chances may be cowed into silence about that corporation."
And, again looking into his time machine to today, the now-deceased Stevens pointed to the frustration of average Americans with Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin.
"On a variety of levels, unregulated corporate electioneering might diminish the ability of citizens to 'hold officials accountable to the people,' and disserve the goal of a public debate that is 'uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.'"
Stevens and his fellow "liberals" on the Court were both prescient and right.
They warned in their dissent that foreign money would corrupt our elections and we saw that in a big way in 2016. There's apparently no way of knowing how much of today's political turmoil — from school board to election commission to hospital and airplane violence — is being orchestrated and amplified by foreign players on social media masquerading as Americans to weaken our country.
They warned that because of the Citizens United decision Americans would become cynical and reactionary; that's happening today. Armed militias are in our streets, people are regularly assaulted for their perceived politics, and rightwing media demagogues make millions (literally) promoting hate and fear.
And, they warned, it could doom our republic, something that's now within our sight.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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https://www.amazon.com/Six-Amendments-Should-Change-Constitution/dp/0316373729?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0
By the time of his retirement in June 2010, John Paul Stevens had become the second longest serving Justice in the history of the Supreme Court. Now he draws upon his more than three decades on the Court, during which he was involved with many of the defining decisions of the modern era, to offer a book like none other. Six Amendments is an absolutely unprecedented call to arms, detailing six specific ways in which the Constitution should be amended in order to protect our democracy and the safety and wellbeing of American citizens.
2014 book
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/conservative-supreme-court-justices-tortured-reasoning-in-the-disastrous-wisconsin-case-is-a-thin-excuse-for-their-true-purpose/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/the-supreme-court-is-poised-to-extend-gun-rights-at-the-worst-possible-time/
no lnx
The Supreme Court is poised to extend gun rights at the worst possible time
Supreme Court of the United States
Written by Bill Blum / Independent Media Institute April 8, 2020
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” —Second Amendment to the United States Constitution
As the deadly COVID-19 contagion sweeps across the country, gun sales are surging, spurred in many regions by panic buying and purchases by first-time firearm owners. Fearful and insecure Americans are taking advantage of weak and ineffective gun-control laws and stocking up, as President Trump might say, “like never before.”
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is poised to issue its first major Second Amendment opinion in more than a decade in a case that originated, fittingly, in New York City, now the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States. The case—New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York—has the potential to vastly extend the rights of gun owners, and not just in New York, but throughout the entire nation.
At issue is a New York City “rule” (the term the city uses for its local ordinances) that was adopted in 2001 to prohibit residents from transporting licensed handguns beyond municipal limits. The rule was challenged in a federal lawsuit filed in 2013 by the NRA’s New York affiliate and three individuals. A district court judge ruled in the city’s favor in 2015, as did the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 2018. The Supreme Court, however, agreed to review the case at the NRA’s request in January 2019, and heard oral arguments in December.
The plaintiffs contend that the city’s handgun transportation ban should be declared unconstitutional because it conflicts with the Supreme Court’s landmark 2008 decision on the Second Amendment, District of Columbia v. Heller.
In Heller, the Supreme Court struck down a ban on handgun possession in the nation’s capital, ruling for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to gun ownership. Deeply controversial and hotly contested, Heller split the Supreme Court along strict ideological lines, and was resolved on the basis of a 5-4 vote of the justices. The late Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion stood the prior judicial consensus on the Second Amendment on its head, rejecting the great weight of prior scholarship and earlier court opinions, including the Supreme Court’s 1939 decision in United States v. Miller, that had construed the amendment as protecting gun ownership only in connection with service in long-antiquated state militias.
Scalia’s opinion was met by a blistering dissent written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired from the bench in 2010 and passed away last year. Drawing on a wide array of historical sources, Stevens chided Scalia for ignoring the actual debates that took place during the founding era on the ratification of the Constitution and the drafting of the Second Amendment. Those debates, in Stevens’ view, demonstrated the amendment’s purpose was not to safeguard individual gun rights, but to guarantee the survival of the militias as a “collective right” of the citizenry as an alternative to the creation of a large federal standing army.
Stevens lost the battle of persuasion in Heller, and in 2010, in another 5-4 decision that also featured a Stevens dissent—McDonald v. Chicago—the Supreme Court extended Heller, holding that the individual right to keep and bear arms was incorporated by the 14th Amendment’s due process clause and hence was applicable to the states and local governments. The Second Amendment, as interpreted by Scalia, thus became the law of the land.
Although Scalia and Stevens are no longer with us, the ideological divisions they represented remain on the Supreme Court today. Indeed, when it comes to gun rights, the current court is even more conservative than it was in 2008. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, both appointed by Trump, are outspoken proponents of Scalia’s vision of the Second Amendment. And the tribunal’s remaining conservatives—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—participated in Heller and joined Scalia’s majority opinion.
Still, Heller by no means precluded all measures of gun control. As the Second Circuit noted in its evaluation of the New York handgun transportation ban that is now before the court, Heller was technically limited to possession of guns in the home, and established no clear limits on legislation aimed at regulating gun rights outside of the home.
“Like most rights,” Scalia wrote in Heller, “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited… [N]othing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
And in an enigmatic footnote to the above paragraph, Scalia added: “We identify these presumptively lawful regulatory measures only as examples; our list does not purport to be exhaustive.”
Adhering to Scalia’s reasoning, in the years following Heller, lower courts have upheld a broad range of state and local gun-control regulations, a dynamic that has prompted the NRA and other gun-lobby groups to urge the Supreme Court to take up another Second Amendment appeal to reaffirm the amendment’s importance and place stricter limits on gun control. They may have found the perfect test case in the New York transportation ban. Like Heller, the New York ban concerns an outright prohibition, which will be hard, if not impossible, to justify before the court’s conservative majority.
Realizing it would likely lose the case, New York City amended its transportation rule in June to permit residents to take their handguns to second homes, businesses or shooting ranges outside city limits. And in July, the city filed a formal motion with the Supreme Court, requesting that the case be dismissed as moot. The court denied the motion in October, setting the stage for another Second Amendment showdown.
In December’s oral arguments, the city again asked the court to moot the case. The city made no attempt to defend the transportation ban.
Unfortunately, given the city’s capitulation and the Supreme Court’s right-wing orientation, the only real remaining question is the scope of the NRA’s inevitable victory. Even if the court reconsiders the city’s request and enters a dismissal order, the NRA will walk away with a significant win, having forced the city to rescind one of the most stringent gun-control laws in the country. On the other hand, a decision on the merits on constitutional grounds in the NRA’s favor would reward the organization with an even bigger triumph, endangering gun-control laws everywhere.
A nation awash in firearms in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic awaits the court’s decision, which is expected by the end of June.
Bill Blum is a retired judge and a lawyer in Los Angeles. He is a lecturer at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. He writes regularly on law and politics and is the author of three widely acclaimed legal thrillers: Prejudicial Error, The Last Appeal, and The Face of Justice.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-spaulding/justice-stevens-rips-citi_b_7424068.html
...
The opening question addressed Citizens United, the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in 2010 that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money on politics.
Capehart sought Justice Stevens’ reaction to using case-specific litmus tests to screen Supreme Court candidates. Last week, an attendee at a campaign fundraiser told the Washington Post that Hillary Clinton pledged not to nominate anyone to the high court unless she had assurances that they would vote to overturnCitizens United.
“I’m not really sure that that’s wise either for the court or for a presidential candidate to make a litmus test on one particular decision. ... I’m surprised at her statement, and I’m surprised about the question” said Justice Stevens. “If I were running for President, I don’t think I would make such a litmus test, even thoughI think the case ought to be overruled. There’s no doubt about that. I took a few pages to make that point a few years ago.”
The “few pages” Justice Stevens jokingly referenced made up his 90-page dissent to Citizens United. He wrote then thatwhile “American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”
Justice Stevens shows no signs of mellowing or withdrawing his critique. It’s “unfortunate” that Citizens United “and the later cases that followed it give the impression that people with a lot of money have more influence than the average citizen,” he said Tuesday. “The basic principle of elections and democracy is ‘one person, one vote.’ Not ‘a large number of votes for one person with a lot of money.’”
As for solutions to undue influence that comes with money in politics, Justice Stevens suggested that states could pass laws distinguishing between campaign contributions from a state’s own residents and contributions from out-of-staters who have no right to vote in the state’s elections.
Justice Stevens also suggested that debate on a proposed constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United may prompt important changes in jurisprudence. “Even if a particular amendment is not adopted, I think putting it before the country as a whole and increasing attention to an issue, and debating it on the merits, may actually help change the law even if the amendment should not be adopted,” he said.
Justice Stevens is on record in support of an amendment to overturn Citizens United and earlier campaign finance cases, including the foundational 1976 decision Buckley v. Valeo. In April 2014, days after the Supreme Court struck down the overall “aggregate” federal contribution limit in McCutcheon v. FEC, Justice Stevens was a witness in a Senate Rules Committee hearingchaired by Sen. Angus King (I-Maine). Justice Stevens testifiedin favor of a constitutional amendment to reverse the line of Supreme Court cases, beginning with Buckley, which conflated laws regulating unlimited political spending with the abridgement of speech.
Justice Stevens also was asked about the array of possible steps to improve the voting experience. His answer included a call for eliminating burdensome photo identification laws.
“I think they could get rid of - there’s a vast difference between the constitutional issue and the political issue - I think they could get rid of excessive photo IDs [for voting] for example. It never made any sense. And I think that does have an impact on the process,” said Justice Stevens.
His answer is notable because Stevens authored Crawford v. Marion County, a 2008 Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of an Indiana voter photo identification law. Such laws have come under intense scrutiny as discriminatory, as studies show that at least one in 10 eligible voters lack the very specific form of identification that some jurisdictions are now requiring.
Tova Wang, a voting rights expert and author of “The Politics of Voter Suppression,” said that “given his authorship in the majority opinion in the case upholding Indiana’s voter ID law, it is extremely noteworthy that Justice Stevens now would appear to believe that laws like it are a serious barrier to the right to vote. It would be extremely valuable for him to now speak publicly on this, as Judge (Richard) Posner has, to make clear that voter ID laws — that continue to be introduced and passed— suppress the voices of many voters with no valid justification.”
The only thing clearer than his statements at Tuesday’s forum is that Justice Stevens, now 95, shows no sign of letting up any time soon.
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http://www.scotusblog.com/2010/01/citizens-united-v-fec-in-plain-english/
scotus blog
Citizens United v. FEC in plain English
By now, you have likely heard the news: The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the government may not keep corporations (and probably, as Lyle reasons in his post yesterday, labor unions) from spending money to support or denounce individual candidates in elections. While the business entities may not give money directly to campaigns, they may seek to persuade the voting public through other means, including ads, especially where these ads were not broadcast. Why? Because the First Amendment guarantees the right to free speech, and political spending is one form of that protected speech.
The four dissenting Justices were vocal and vociferous: They voiced the concern that allowing unfettered spending by rich corporations will allow those corporations to influence the outcome of elections in sweeping ways. They also explained thatcorporations are not human beings and should not have the same free speech rights that humans do.
As Lyle explained in his post yesterday, certain campaign finance rules remain valid after the Court's decision. Corporations spending more than $10,000 a year on such ads have to disclose the names of donors who supported them. And corporations must reveal who sponsored the ad. Only Justice Thomas did not agree with these restrictions.
The case involved the now-notorious film produced by Citizens United that sought to discredit Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy. In ruling that Citizens United could not broadcast the film, the lower court invoked a federal law (known to most of us as McCain-Feingold) which prohibited corporations from spending money to broadcast "electioneering communications" within a certain number of days before an election. In other words, the law heavily restricted corporations' political speech in the form of spending, as well as the timing and forum of broadcasts.Labor unions had been similarly restrained under federal law for over sixth years.
The timing of the decision is exquisite. With the mid-term elections coming up later this year, the decision is sure to prompt many corporations to make room in their budgets for political spending.
Much about today's decision was not unusual: The Court was split five-to-four, along typical ideological lines (Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, and Scalia in the majority, Sotomayor, Breyer, Ginsburg, and Stevens dissenting). The case made sweeping changes in federal election law, overturning previous Supreme Court cases and clarifying language in others.
But there were quite a few things about the Citizens United announcement and opinion that were unusual.
First, the length of the opinion. Actually, there were five opinions. Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority of five justices, and Justice Stevens wrote for the dissenters. Justices Scalia and Thomas and Chief Justice Roberts also filed separate opinions. But taken as a whole, this opinion was 176 pages. Unprecedented? Certainly not "“ big cases often result in long, detailed opinions, as well as several concurrences and dissents (and some opinions, especially in campaign finance and death penalty cases, have even approached 300 pages). But unusual? Definitely so. Remember that these opinions are dense, devoted to legal analysis and citation. Reading this opinion was an all-day job, even for those in the know. And writing it? That must have been an incredibly arduous task.
:{At this point, it may be useful to discuss how opinions are written at the Supreme Court. You probably know that a majority opinion is authored by a single Justice, but it stands for the opinion of the Court. Therefore, when we see Citizens United cited in the future, we won't hear people say, "Justice Kennedy said . . ." Instead, they will say, "The Supreme Court held." In other words, Justice Kennedy was responsible for expressing the views of the Court, not just his own. How did he come to write the opinion? Well, the Chief Justice (who has been on the Court for less time than all but one of the Justices in the majority, Justice Alito, but is nonetheless regarded as "senior" to the other Justices because he's the Chief Justice) would have assigned him to do so.
When the Chief is in the majority, he assigns the opinion to another Justice in the majority (or sometimes to himself). He chooses the author of the opinion based on a number of factors, such as whether a Justice has completed his/her workload, whether a Justice is due for his/her turn in writing an opinion (the Justices traditionally try to spread out the load as evenly as possible), and even how likely it is that authorship will keep a Justice in the majority. When the Chief is not in the majority, the senior justice in the majority makes the assignment.}:
Now, the Justices author the opinions, but they have lots of help. Every Justice is allowed to have up to four law clerks to help him/her with his opinion writing, among other tasks. Law clerks are usually recent law school graduates, most of whom were at the top of their respective classes at some of the best law schools in the country. Some Justices ask the clerks to write a first draft of an opinion, then give it to the Justice to revise. Some do the reverse. At least one Justice is widely known to employ both methods, drafting his own opinions but asking the law clerks to do the same, then deciding how to combine the two. At the very least, law clerks research the legal issues exhaustively and talk through the reasoning in an opinion with their Justice. For a case of this magnitude, that entailed countless hours of work.
What all of this means in terms of Citizens United is that there are some mighty tired law clerks and Justices out there somewhere. This case has been a long haul, from the cert. grant last Term to the first argument (also last Term) to the re-argument in September to this behemoth opinion, which certainly went through many drafts.
On to unusual detail number two. As mentioned above, this case has been going on for quite some time. In fact, it has even survived a Justice (Justice Souter, who retired in June) and lived to see a new one (Justice Sotomayor, who took her seat on the SCOTUS bench this summer). While it does happen from time to time that a case will be at the Court that long, it certainly does not happen often. The Justices try to conclude their work in deciding cases by late June every year. Often, this means that we see a slew of opinions in June "“ an exciting time for SCOTUS watchers. But in this case, the Court instead asked for re-argument this fall, meaning that they heard argument in the case twice. Why did the Court ask for the re-argument? Essentially, to address additional issues beyond the narrow ones on which the Court originally granted cert., including whether the Court should overrule precedential cases upholding restrictions on political spending by corporations.
Court watchers have been predicting for weeks that this decision would come down any minute. Now that we have seen the opinion, particularly the lengthy dissent, we can understand why it took quite some time. And the truth is that the Court makes its own schedule. It takes its time to make sure that an opinion is just right before announcing it; that makes sense, given how important the cases before the Court are and how far reaching the decisions will be.
So, unusual detail number three. The Court announced on Wednesday that it would have a morning session on Thursday, on a day with no arguments scheduled. Decisions are usually announced and opinions released on days when arguments take place; if you go to the Court to hear an argument, you may be lucky enough to be there on an opinion day, and you will hear one of the Justices announce the decision of the Court from the bench. There are also several days in non-argument weeks when the Justices announce orders and opinions. But given that today was supposed to be a work day for the Justices, rather than a day when they headed into the courtroom, Court watchers could guess that it was going to be an important decision coming down, and indeed many thought the time had certainly come for the decision in Citizens United.
Finally, unusual detail number four. Justice Stevens read his dissent (or some of it "“ if he had read all ninety pages, we'd still be in Court) from the bench. While the author of the majority opinion will often select a key portion of that opinion to read from the bench, it is quite unusual for a dissenter to do so. When it happens, it's a sign that the dissenter feels very strongly that the Court got it wrong. Because the Court has a stake in operating as a uniform body "“ which is what keeps the rule of law alive, after all "“ dissenters generally "respectfully" dissent, both in writing (check out the last line of almost any dissenting opinion) and in conduct.
For more details on the substance of what the Court decided yesterday, check out Lyle's informative posts on the opinion, as well as the links collected by Erin to other media sources.
==
wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Paul_Stevens
John Paul Stevens (born April 20, 1920) is a retired associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States who served from December 19, 1975 until his retirement on June 29, 2010. At the time of his retirement, he was the oldest Justice then serving, the second-oldest serving Justice in the history of the Court,[1][2][3] and the third longest-serving US Supreme Court Justice in history. He was nominated by President Gerald Ford to replace the Court's longest-serving justice, William O. Douglas. Stevens is widely considered to have been on the liberal side of the Court at the time of his retirement.[4][5] Stevens served with three Chief Justices (Warren E. Burger, William Rehnquist, and John G. Roberts).
Contents
- 1Life and career
- 2Judicial philosophy
- 3Other significant opinions
- 4Popular culture
- 5See also
- 6References
- 7Further reading
- 8External links
Life and career
Early life, 1920–1947
Stevens was born on April 20, 1920, in Hyde Park,[6] Chicago, Illinois, to a wealthy family.[4] His paternal grandfather had formed an insurance company and held real estate in Chicago, while his great-uncle owned the Chas A. Stevensdepartment store. His father, Ernest James Stevens (1884-1972), was a lawyer who later became a hotelier, owning two hotels, the La Salle and the Stevens Hotel. He lost ownership of the hotels during the Great Depression and was convicted of embezzlement (the conviction was later overturned).[4] (The Stevens Hotel was subsequently bought by Hilton Hotelsand is today the Chicago Hilton and Towers.) His mother, Elizabeth Maude (Street) Stevens (1881-1979), was a high school English teacher. Two of his three older brothers also became lawyers.
As a boy, Stevens attended the 1932 World Series baseball game in Chicago's Wrigley Field in which Babe Ruth called his shot. Stevens later recalled: "Ruth did point to the center-field scoreboard. And he did hit the ball out of the park after he pointed with his bat. So it really happened."[7] He also had the opportunity to meet several notable people of the era, including the famed aviators Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh, the latter of whom gave him a caged dove as a gift.[8]
The family lived in Hyde Park, and John Paul Stevens attended the University of Chicago Laboratory School. He subsequently obtained a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Chicago in 1941; while in college, Stevens also became a member of the Omega chapter of Psi Upsilon.
He began work on his master's degree in English at the university in 1941, but soon decided to join the United States Navy. He enlisted on December 6, 1941, one day before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and served as an intelligence officer in the Pacific Theater from 1942 to 1945. Stevens was awarded a Bronze Star for his service in the codebreaking team whose work led to the downing of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto's plane in 1943.[4]
Stevens married Elizabeth Jane Shereen in June 1942. Divorcing her in 1979, he married Maryan Mulholland Simon that December. He has four children: John Joseph (who died of cancer in 1996), Kathryn, Elizabeth, and Susan.
With the end of World War II, Stevens returned to Illinois intending to return to his studies in English, but was persuaded by his brother Richard, who was a lawyer, to attend law school. Stevens enrolled in the Northwestern University School of Law in 1945 (the G.I. Bill mostly paying his way). He was a brilliant student, earning the highest GPA in the history of the law school.[4] He received his J.D. in 1947, graduating magna cum laude.[9]
Legal career, 1947–1970
Given his stellar academic performance in law school, several prominent Northwestern faculty members recommended Stevens for a Supreme Court clerkship: he served as a clerk to Justice Wiley Rutledge during the 1947–48 term[4] (This service, Stevens has said, deeply inspired him, as evident from his Rutledgean focus on the careful interpretation of the facts in a case present in his opinions).
Following his clerkship, Stevens returned to Chicago and joined the law firm of Poppenhusen, Johnston, Thompson & Raymond (which, in the 1960s, would becomeJenner & Block). Stevens was admitted to the bar in 1949. He determined that he would not stay long at the Poppenhusen firm after he was docked a day's pay for taking the day off to travel to Springfield to swear his oath of admission. During his time at the Poppenhusen firm, Stevens began his practice in antitrust law.
In 1951, he returned to Washington, D.C. to serve as Associate Counsel to the Subcommittee on the Study of Monopoly Power of the Judiciary Committee of the U.S.House of Representatives. During this time, the subcommittee worked on several highly publicized investigation concerns in many industries, most notably Major League Baseball.
In 1952, Stevens returned to Chicago and, together with two other young lawyers he had worked with at the Poppenhusen firm, formed his own law firm, Rothschild, Stevens, Barry & Myers. They soon developed a successful practice, with Stevens continuing to focus on antitrust cases. His growing expertise in antitrust law led to an invitation to teach the "Competition and Monopoly" course at the University of Chicago Law School, and from 1953 to 1955, he was a member of the Attorney General'sNational Committee to Study Antitrust Laws. At the same time, Stevens was making a name for himself as a first-rate antitrust litigator and was involved in a number of trials. He was widely regarded by colleagues as an extraordinarily capable and impressive lawyer with a fantastic memory and analytical ability, and authored a number of influential works on antitrust law.[10]
In 1969, the Greenberg Commission, appointed by the Illinois Supreme Court to investigate Sherman Skolnick's corruption allegations leveled at former Chief JusticeRay Klingbiel and current Chief Justice Roy J. Solfisburg, Jr., named Stevens as their counsel, meaning that he essentially served as the commission's special prosecutor.[4] The Commission was widely thought to be a whitewash, but Stevens proved them wrong by vigorously prosecuting the justices, forcing them from office in the end.[11] As a result of the prominence he gained during the Greenberg Commission, Stevens became Second Vice President of the Chicago Bar Association in 1970.
Judicial career, 1970–2010
Stevens's role in the Greenberg Commission catapulted him to prominence and was largely responsible for President Richard Nixon's decision to appoint Stevens as a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on November 20, 1970.
President Gerald Ford then nominated him as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court in 1975 to replace Justice William O. Douglas, who had recently retired, and he took his seat December 19, 1975, after being confirmed 98–0 by the Senate.
:{When Harry Blackmun retired in 1994, Stevens became the senior Associate Justice and thus assumed the administrative duties of the Court whenever the post ofChief Justice of the United States was vacant or the Chief Justice was unable to perform his duties.
Stevens performed the duties of Chief Justice in September 2005, between the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist and the swearing-in of new Chief Justice John Roberts, and presided over oral arguments on a number of occasions when the Chief Justice was ill or recused. Also in September 2005 Stevens was honored with a Symposium by Fordham Law School for his 30 years on the Supreme Court, and President Ford wrote a letter stating his continued pride in appointing him.[12][13]}:
In a 2005 speech, Stevens stressed the importance of "learning on the job"; for example, during his tenure on the Court, Stevens changed his views on affirmative action (initially opposed), as well as on other issues.[14] President Ford praised Stevens in 2005: "He is serving his nation well, with dignity, intellect and without partisan political concerns."[15]
As his seniority grew in the closing decade of the Rehnquist court, Stevens was often the senior justice on one side of a split decision and thereby entitled to assign the writing of the opinion. He almost always wrote a dissenting opinion when in dissent and wrote concurring opinions more often than most other justices historically.[citation ^needed]^ Additionally, he participated actively in questioning during oral arguments.[5] Stevens was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008.[16]
On April 9, 2010, Stevens announced his intention to retire from the Court;[18] he subsequently retired on June 29 of that year.[19]On January 20, 2009, Stevens administered the oath of office to Vice President Joe Biden at Biden's request.[17] It is customary for the vice president to be inaugurated by the person of his or her choice: Vice President Al Gore chose to be sworn in by Justice Byron White in 1993 and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1997. Vice President Dick Cheney was sworn in by Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 2001 and U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert in 2005.
Tenure and age
Stevens retired as the third-longest-serving justice in the history of the Court with 34 years, six months service. The longest-serving is his immediate predecessor, Justice William O. Douglas, who served 36 and a half years. Stevens is also the second-oldest justice, aged 90 years and two months at retirement, in the Court's history behind Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who retired at the age of 90 years and 10 months. In July 2015, Stevens became the longest-lived retired justice, surpassing Stanley Forman Reed, who died at age 95 years and 93 days.
On June 26, 2015, Stevens attended the Court's announcement of the opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges,[20] in which the Court held that state recognition of same-sex marriage is a constitutional right under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Political affiliation
When he was appointed to the Supreme Court, Stevens was a registered Republican.[21] Asked in an interview in September 2007 if he still considers himself a Republican, Stevens declined to comment.[22]
Judicial philosophy
On the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Stevens had a moderately conservative record. Early in his tenure on the Supreme Court, Stevens had a relatively moderate voting record. He voted to reinstate capital punishment in the United States and opposed race-based admissions programs such as the program at issue in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978). But on the more conservative Rehnquist Court, Stevens joined the more liberal Justices on issues such asabortion rights, gay rights and federalism. His Segal–Cover score, a measure of the perceived liberalism/conservatism of Court members when they joined the Court, places him squarely on the conservative side of the Court.[23] However, a 2003 statistical analysis of Supreme Court voting patterns found Stevens the most liberal member of the Court.[24][25] President Ford expressed no regrets about Stevens' drift toward liberalism, writing in a 2005 letter to USA Today, "Justice Stevens has made me, and our fellow citizens, proud of my three decade old decision to appoint him to the Supreme Court."[26]
Stevens's jurisprudence has usually been characterized as idiosyncratic.Stevens, unlike most justices, usually wrote the first drafts of his opinions himself and reviewed petitions for certiorari within his chambers instead of having his law clerks participate as part of the cert pool. He is not an originalist (such as fellow Justice Antonin Scalia) nor a pragmatist (such as Judge Richard Posner), nor does he pronounce himself a cautious liberal (such as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg). He was considered part of the liberal bloc of the Court starting in the mid-1980s, and was dubbed the "Chief Justice of the Liberal Supreme Court",[27][28] though he publicly called himself a judicial conservative in 2007.[29][30]
In 1985's Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, 473 U.S. 432 (1985), Stevens argued against the Supreme Court's famous "strict scrutiny" doctrine for laws involving "suspect classifications", putting forth the view that all classifications should be evaluated on the basis of the "rational basis" test as to whether they could have been enacted by an "impartial legislature". In Burnham v. Superior Court of California, 495 U.S. 604 (1990), Stevens demonstrated his independence with a characteristically pithy concurrence.
Stevens was once an impassioned critic of affirmative action; in addition to the 1978 decision in Bakke, he dissented in the case of Fullilove v. Klutznick, 448 U.S. 448(1980), which upheld a minority set-aside program. He shifted his position over the years and voted to uphold the affirmative action program at the University of Michigan Law School challenged in 2003's Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003).
Stevens wrote the majority opinion in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in 2006, in which he held that certain military commissions had been improperly constituted. He also wrote a lengthy dissenting opinion in Citizens United v. FEC, arguing the majority should not make a decision so broad that it would overturn precedents set in three previous Supreme Court cases.
Stevens's views on obscenity under the First Amendment have changed over the years. Initially quite critical of constitutional protection for obscenity, rejecting a challenge to Detroit zoning ordinances that barred adult theaters in designated areas in 1976'sYoung v. American Mini Theatres, 427 U.S. 50 (1976), ("[E]ven though we recognize that the First Amendment will not tolerate the total suppression of erotic materials that have some arguably artistic value, it is manifest that society's interest in protecting this type of expression is of a wholly different, and lesser, magnitude than the interest in untrammeled political debate"), Stevens now adheres firmly to a libertarian free speech approach on obscenity issues, voting to strike down a federal law regulating online obscene content considered "harmful to minors" in 2002's ACLU v. Ashcroft, 535 U.S. 564 (2002), which in a dissenting opinion Stevens argued that while "[a]s a parent, grandparent, and great-grandparent", he endorsed the legislative goal of protecting children from pornography "without reservation": "As a judge, I must confess to a growing sense of unease when the interest in protecting children from prurient materials is invoked as a justification for using criminal regulation of speech as a substitute for, or a simple backup to, adult oversight of children's viewing."[31]Freedom of speech
Perhaps the most personal and unusual feature of his jurisprudence is his continual referencing of World War II in his opinions, which Stevens often cites in an attempt to appeal to shared patriotic, American values. For example, Stevens, a World War II veteran, was visibly angered by William Kunstler's flippant defense of flag-burning in oral argument in 1989's Texas v. Johnson, 491U.S. 397 (1989) and voted to uphold a prohibition on flag-burning against a First Amendment argument. Wrote Stevens, "The ideas of liberty and equality have been an irresistible force in motivating leaders like Patrick Henry, Susan B. Anthony, and Abraham Lincoln, schoolteachers like Nathan Hale and Booker T. Washington, thePhilippine Scouts who fought at Bataan, and the soldiers who scaled the bluff at Omaha Beach. If those ideas are worth fighting for – and our history demonstrates that they are – it cannot be true that the flag that uniquely symbolizes their power is not itself worthy of protection from unnecessary desecration."
Stevens generally supports students' right to free speech in public schools.He wrote sharply worded dissents in Bethel v. Fraser, 478 U.S. 675 (1986) and Morse v. Frederick, 551 U.S. 393 (2007), two decisions that restricted students' freedom of speech. However, he joined the court's ruling on Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S.260 (1988) that upheld a principal's censorship of a student newspaper.
Establishment Clause
...
Crawford v. Marion County Election Board
Stevens wrote the lead opinion in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, a case where the Court upheld the right of states to require an official photo identification card to help ensure that only citizens vote. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy joined this opinion, and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito agreed with them on the outcome. Edward B. Foley, an election law expert at Ohio State University, said the Stevens opinion might represent an effort to "depoliticize election law cases".[41]Stevens's vote in Crawford and his agreement with the Court's conservative majority in two other cases during the 2007–2008 term (Medellin v. Texas, 552 U.S. 491(2008) and Baze v. Rees) has led University of Oklahoma law professor and former Stevens clerk Joseph Thai to wonder if Stevens is "tacking back a little bit toward the center".
Bush v. Gore
In Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), Stevens wrote a scathing dissent on the Court's ruling to stay the recount of votes in Florida during the 2000 presidential election. He believed that the holding displayed "an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed". He continued, "The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today's decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."
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Justice Stevens Suggests Solution for 'Giant Step in the Wrong Direction'
www.nytimes.com/.../justice-stevenss-prescription-for-giant-step...
1.
Citizens United Attacks From Justice Stevens Continue - Huffington Post
www.huffingtonpost.com/.../citizens-united-justice-stevens_n_15...
2.
Former Justice Stevens criticizes court over campaign spending ...
www.cnn.com/2012/05/30/politics/stevens-campaign-spending/
2.
Justice Stevens' Reasoned Takedown of Citizens United | ACS
www.acslaw.org › Blog
2.
60 minuteshttp://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7096996n
35 yrs on bench, retired at 90, appt by ford, but switched sides
~B2 on guantanamo, ~ B v Gore: at party the night before, jps thot 10 min b/c obviously no harm
recount differ in diff counties? cd not be fixed before deadline. jps said decison not partisan, just wrong
dad built the largest hotel in world (chic, gangsters robbed at gunpt)
dissent on jose padilla (// souter)
Dissent on CU: said it was legis from bench: legis is a debate, has to be a fair fight
segued to babe ruth?!
http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/citizens-united-v-federal-election-commission/
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But you can plainly see the weariness in Stevens eyes and hear it in his voice today as he is forced to contend with a legal fiction that has come to life today, a sort of constitutional Frankenstein moment when corporate speech becomes even more compelling than the "voices of the real people" who will be drowned out. Even former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist once warned that treating corporate spending as the First Amendment equivalent of individual free speech is "to confuse metaphor with reality." Today that metaphor won a very real victory at the Supreme Court. And as a consequence some very real corporations are feeling very, very good.