Alexander Cockburn: His Supreme Court Nominee Will Be Obama's True Legacy
With the impending departure from the U.S. Supreme Court of Justice John Paul Stevens at the age of 89, we lose one of the nation's last substantive ties to the Great Depression and to the effect of that disaster on the political outlook of a couple of generations.
Stevens' father, Ernest, owned a famous hotel in Chicago -- the Stevens, with 3,000 rooms, now the Hilton. It was built in 1927, and there, young John Paul met Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh and Babe Ruth.
But by 1934, hard times took their toll. The hotel went bankrupt. John Paul's father, grandfather and uncle were all indicted on charges that they'd diverted money from the Illinois Life Insurance Co. (founded by the grandfather) to try and bail out the hotel. The uncle committed suicide, and Stevens' father was convicted. The Illinois Supreme Court exonerated him two years later, stating, "there's not a scintilla of evidence of any concealment or fraud."
Thus did John Paul, still in his teens, acquire his life-long skepticism of police and prosecutors. Between the year he went on the Court (put up by Gerald Ford in 1974 on the recommendation of Ford's attorney general, Chicagoan Edward Levi) and 2010, Stevens voted against the government in criminal justice and death penalty cases 70 percent of the time. Only one justice -- William O. Douglas, whose seat Stevens took over -- served longer on the Court. When Justice Harry Blackmun retired in 1994, Stevens became the senior associate justice and thus able to assign opinions to the justice of his choice. Stevens played his field expertly, time and again maneuvering the swing vote -- Anthony Kennedy -- onto his side by assigning him the task of writing the opinion....
As Obama and his counselors ponder potential nominees, the air is filled with counsel that Obama should avoid a protracted fight and should pick "a moderate" -- i.e., pro-business, pro-government -- nominee, like Elena Kagan, 49, now solicitor general and, in earlier years, head of the Harvard Law School and, before that, Clinton's deputy domestic policy adviser, in which capacity she oversaw, among other assignments, welfare "reform." One of her colleagues at the White House at that time was Christopher Edley, now the Dean at Boalt, the law school at UC Berkeley. Edley says of Kagan that her politics were "center to center-right."...
Kagan is the worst possibility thus far to surface, but the others potential nominees are scarcely inspiring. There's the mainstream liberal Diane Wood, who sits the Federal Appeals Court in Chicago, and Merrick Garland, a neoliberal Clinton appointee in the mold of Justice Stephen Breyer, corporate America's judicial representative on the Court. (Stevens, by contrast, began his legal career as an anti-trust lawyer.) Garland, another Chicagoan, is now on the Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia....
There's one more name that has been nervously circulated among progressive circles, that of Elizabeth Warren, currently head of the Congressional Oversight Panel on the banking bailout. Warren originally hails from Oklahoma and is a professor at Harvard Law School. Warren is as close as we can now get to Stevens' economic populism and has been eloquent on the topic of corporate skullduggery and on the pro-bank tilt of the bailout. She would actually be a shrewd choice for Obama because it would turn the Supreme Court confirmation hearings into a debate on economic justice, consumer protection and regulation of Wall Street, where Warren's Republican opponents would be forced to take the side of the rich at a moment when the rich are not popular with a large number of Americans.
Don't hold your breath.