Republican Appointed Justices Continue to Betray the Cause

I keep hearing I must compromise my Constitutional conservative views and vote for Mitt Romney. If I don't, Obama is going to put more radical liberals on our Republic's highest court. This might be all very true, but with the Justice John Roberts ruling on Obamacare, Justice Roberts being a George W. Bush appointee, I ask myself does it really matter?

Rush Limbaugh has no problem talking about Republican picks that joined the dark side. There are many of them that have done things that leave us scratching our heads just like the Robert's opinion. In The American Conservative, they outline all the Republican appointed Justices that have betrayed us.

When the Senate narrowly confirmed Clarence Thomas, liberals feared he would be the deciding vote against Roe v. Wade. Well, Thomas did rule that Roe was wrongly decided at his first opportunity. But in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a 5-4 majority affirmed the core holding of the infamous abortion decision.

Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, saved Roe with a pivotal flip-flop and ended up writing an opinion as filled with liberal clichés as any amicus brief filed by a pointy-headed lefty law professor. Sandra Day O’Connor, also a Reagan pick, was another of three Republicans to join the plurality opinion. Harry Blackmun, a Nixon appointee, gave us Roe in the first place. Earl Warren, William Brennan, John Paul Stevens, David Souter—some of the most liberal justices of the postwar era were actually named by Republican presidents.

It’s too early to include John Roberts in that sad pantheon of Republican judicial failures. The chief justice has generally been the conservative jurist his supporters had hoped he would be, and a conservative conviction—a belief in judicial restraint—likely factored into his opinion in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. But Roberts’s untimely defection was in many respects a bigger blow to conservative legal circles than Kennedy’s two decades ago.