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Visualizing the Ideological History of SCOTUS
langelgjm writes "An interesting exercise in quantifying and visualizing ideological shifts, the website ScotusScores.com tracks changes in the ideological history of the US Supreme Court from 1937 to 2007. Ideological positions are quantified using Martin-Quinn scores, and the chart highlights the often-bumpy transitions (Thurgood Marshall to Clarence Thomas), as well as tendencies within each Justice's career."
One of the things that immediately struck me was that the conservative judges seemed to be more conservative than the liberal judges were liberal, based on the vividness of the color. Aha, I thought, I knew the liberals were more moderate!
But actually I think that's an artifact of the way the coloring was done. Look at Rehnquist as an associate and see the vivid red that his first year shows as, which is 3.98. Now look at Thurgood Marshall, below him, and find a -3.95. Those should look pretty similar in terms of intensity, but the blue looks much closer to white than the red does.
What I think is happening is this. They are color coding not on absolutes like that, but based on the distance between 0 and the most conservative or liberal number. But the most liberal justice is at -6, which the most conservative one is only at -5. So if you get a 4, that's 80% of the way to being the most conservative, but someone who is equivalently liberal at -4 is only 66% of the way to being the most liberal. So they get a color that looks like they are 66 points away from moderate as opposed to 80 points for the conservatives.
Well that's misleading. I think the color gradation changes need to be symmetrical across the graph or it's going to be super confusing. Maybe just call -5 the most liberal you can be and don't worry about shading Douglas more? Or make 6 the most conservative you can be and give up the super deep red color for now.
> Alot of Progressive Democrats through WW2 and into the 50s were happy to call themselves racist,
> and many Republicans still marginally considered themslves enlightened party-of-Lincoln
> non-racists. There was a big realignment of constiuencies around '68, and this tends to skew
> the definitional "liberal"/"conservative" meanings.
Not exactly. whne public opinon on racism turned against it the Progressives in the media, academy and the arts did a fast pivot and suddenly racism was a conservative/republican thing. The official histories were rewritten and now Republicans have ALWAYS been racists and Democrats have ALWAYS been the enlightened folk. But it ain't so.
To hear modern 'historians' tell it Lincoln was a Democrat, the labels have just swapped somehow.
Nope. Go look at old history. The Solid South was all Democrat until the late 1970's. Seriously, most Southern states didn't elect their first Republican Governor or Senator until then. All those bigots you see in the grainy newsreels turning water hoses and dogs on people, yup every last one of them was a Democrat.
Democrats hated Lincoln (the first Republican POTUS) even more than that hate Bush (the most recent Republican POTUS). So from Lincoln to Bush the Republicans have a pretty good record on the race issue. Debate all you want about other aspects of the Bush record but the diversity of his administration is not really debatable. Meanwhile Bill Clinton was hailed as the 'first black president' at the time but had a pretty darned monochome group of people around him.
And at this point the doubters will bring up Nixon and his "Southern Strategy." No. Total myth. Nixon was many bad things, stupid wasn't one of them. Go hit wikipedia and examine the election returns. Note the third candidate. Ok, remember that southern bigots HATED Republicans. Hated with a white hot hate that would never die. (the idiots dying off was the way it ended as things turned out) So you are a Southern Yellow Dog Democrat and you have McGovern, Nixon and Wallace to pick from. Oh yea, you are going to pick Nixon. Riight. We are to believe Nixon thought he could out bigot George Wallace without alienating the northern Republicans.
Note that there is ONE Kleagle of the Klan seated in the US Congress. He is not a Republican.
This should be enough to put the "Republicans are racists" myth is put in question. (It can't be 'debunked' in a slashdot post, all I can hope for is to plant some seeds of doubt. It is up to YOU to follow up and learn the Truth for yourself.) Now lets examine the other side a bit more.
As noted above, the south was almost enturely Southern Democrats. But the racism of the Democratic Party was by no means a Southern thang. It permeates the entire 'Progressive' project. Go read Jonah Goldberg's _Liberal Fascism_ to get a full exploration of the connection between today's Democratic Party, the old Progressive movement, the Communists AND the Fascists and Nazis. Yes, including the noxious ideas on race.
In this space lets let one example serve to get the curious asking questions about the accuracy of the history they have been taught. Take Hillary Clinton's 'hero' Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. Go dig into this central figure of the Progressive movement a bit. Lets just say it isn't an accident most of their efforts were (and still are) concentrated in the areas with large 'ethnic' populations. Crazy bitch was quite open (as most of the early Progressives were) about her notions regarding culling out the fast breeding but inferior breeds.
Democrat delenda est
What we get is erratic judging because bad precedent piles on previous bad precedent. But it is just post modern twaddle to assert that impartial judging is impossible. There are some pretty clear guideposts to judge the quality of a court's judging by.
what should good judging look like? Here are some rules of thumb.
1. What we want is the Rule of Law and not the Rule of Men. This means we need a dead Constitution, not a living one. The Constitution has to mean what it meant when it was written. Yes it CAN change, but only by the Amendment process, not judges deciding 'society has changed' or 'evolving standards'.
2. The best measure of whether you have the Rule of Law is whether people know what the rules are in advance. The Founders tried to make that possible by building in lots of sane defaults. Then they added the Bill of Rights to add more clarity with lots of "Congress shall pass no law..." and "shall not be infringed" short of language to clearly define limits to the powers of the Federal Government and topped off with the 9th and 10th Amendments to attempt to put the government in a small clearly defined area. Basically, unless it is clearly specified that something IS something the Federal Government controls the default answer is NO, the government can't do it.
It really shouldn't take much thought to figure out how the Supremes SHOULD rule on most questions. The problem is even the most strict originalists lack both the numbers and the courage to break with precedent and clean out most of the Federal government and thus have to weasel their way to slowly try to push the law in originalist directions without wholesale renunciation of precedent.
3. How would a court full of Vulcans or correctly operating expert systems rule? Working correctly the court would be bored to death because everyone on the lower courts would know how the Supreme Court would rule, and even most of the litigants would know, thus few cases would ever be appealed to them. But because with our current broken system neither side has a frickin clue how any given court, including the SCOTUS, will rule we get endless court action. Heck, by the time your case works its way up the makeup of the SCOTUS will probably change.
Some examples might make these ideas more understandable:
Roe v Wade: The Constitution is silent on abortion thus the 10th reserves it as an issue for the States. The Feds can neither outlaw abortion nationwide or forbid the States from outlawing it. Citizenship is defined as 'born or naturalized' so the pro-life argument that a fetus is a baby may or may not have merit, but that a fetus isn't a Citizen is black letter law as the Constitution is currently written.
McCain/Feingold: What part of Congress shall make no law... is beyond the comprehension of the Honorable Senators? Note that the entirety of the Campaign Finance regulatory regime fails this test along with most of the FEC regulatory machinery.
Democrat delenda est
> The Constitution does not grant the Congress an explicitly enumerated power to regulate marriage.
No it doesn't. But it is still one of the more interesting questions the court will eventually have to settle. Both sides can make a strong originalist case. Observe:
The DOMA isn't about marriage per se, it is about clarifying the Full Faith and Credit clause in the Constitution. The word marriage has a specific meaning. Some states have suddenly decided (mostly by judicial fiat, but we now have some states which did it correctly) the word has a different meaning. If State A redefines a word that redefinition is not required to be accepted by State B. So just because two men are "Married" in Vermont does not mean West Virginia has to accept that their marriage laws have been redefined in ways that make a mockery of the purpose of those laws as understood in West Virginia.
The other side just has to mention that it wasn't too many years back that "Marriage" didn't include mixed race couples in quite a few states and the courts ruled that such a marriage was valid in every state. Right there you are most of the way to winning the argument. And Nevada was notorious for it's divorce laws. And marriages involving girls so young it would be statutory rape in most states wasn't illegal so long as you kept that marriage license handy. And finally, had not Utah not been required to renounce bigamy before admission to the Union their marriages would have almost certainly been legal nationwide.
So both sides can make a case, which way to rule? Most cases I can get on my soapbox and declare a winner. Can't on this one.
Democrat delenda est