No one is nominated to the Supreme Court on the basis of their scholarship or intelligence. They are nominated because the President wants them to vote a certain way. Lawrence Tribe should have been on the Court years ago, and is one of the greatest Constitutional scholars alive today. Even though he is a liberal, I would have appointed him. Robert Bork as well. He was hugely slandered to keep him off the Court. And the Republicans have made sure that Tribe will never get there. It would be great to see those two minds grappling with the issues today, but it won't happen, because they are smart enough to think independently, and might not be a reliable vote.
Instead we get these clowns who have no business on the Court, like Thomas, Kagan, Sotomayor, Ginsburg etc. because they have a particular slant. None of them had a body of work to examine, so they were told how to vote before they were nominated.
Don't think the Court is a bastion of legal intelligence. It is now just as political as the other branches of government.
Originally Posted by CuteOldGuy
I agree that presidents from both parties do appoint supreme court judges partly because of their politics.
But if you look at the supreme court judges appointed by Republican presidents that turned out to be flaming liberals or moderates, you have to figure they weren't screened too tightly. Souter, O'Connor and Kennedy have not proven to be consistantly conservative in their rulings and were appointed by Bush and Reagan.
In 1953 president Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren as chief justice. His rulings were extremely left wing. Eisenhower said that his biggest regret in eight years in office was the appointment of Earl Warren.
I don't know of any justices appointed by a Democrat president that turned out to be conservatives.