John Paul Stevens Evolved into the Supreme Court’s Unlikely Liberal Champion
John Paul Stevens, who served on the Supreme Court for 35 years before retiring in 2010, passed away on Tuesday evening due to complications from a stroke. He was 99 years old.
Justice Stevens lived so long that some of the names sprinkled into his biography almost seem implausible. Growing up in a well-to-do Chicago family, he met Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh, who for some reason gave the young Stevens a caged dove as a gift. At age 12, he was in the Wrigley Field stands for Babe Ruth's "called shot" during the 1932 World Series. Although many baseball historians are dubious of the legend's veracity, Stevens insisted it happened as described, and here, the testimony of a Supreme Court justice carries a fair amount of weight. He became famous for the bow ties he wore each day—so much so that for his last day on the bench, spectators in the gallery wore bow ties, too, in a fond sartorial tribute.
Stevens was appointed in 1975 by a Republican president, Gerald Ford, and ended up being Ford's lone Supreme Court pick. But while modern GOP-nominated justices like Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch earn their nods only after careful vetting by right-wing activist groups, back then the president's party was not as clear a signal of the nominee's future jurisprudence. And over the course of his career, Stevens tacked to the left as the Court shifted to the right, earning him a reputation as one of the preeminent liberal justices by the time he stepped down. None of its current members—of any ideological persuasion—has undergone a similar evolution in their philosophies.
He opposed affirmative action in the Court's 1978 Bakke decision, for example, before lending it his support in Grutter in 2003. After voting in 1976 to uphold the constitutionality of the death penalty in Gregg v. Georgia, he became an ardent opponent of capital punishment, and later admitted that that vote is the one he regrets the most. He was swayed by advances in DNA technology and, as he explained to NPR in 2010, by changes to criminal procedure that make it easier for prosecutors to seek the death penalty in a wider variety of cases. "I really think that the death penalty today is vastly different from the death penalty that we thought we were authorizing," he said. And so he decided he could not support it any longer.
Supreme Court justices often profess to be neutral arbiters, immune to the political ramifications of applying the law—as Chief Justice John Roberts once put it, he sees himself as a robe-wearing umpire calling legal "balls and strikes." Stevens, however, often displayed an awareness of the real-world impact of the Court's decisions that many of his colleagues pretend not to consider. In 2000, a 5-4 conservative majority put a stop to Florida's recount during the disputed 2000 presidential election, effectively handing the White House to Republican candidate George W. Bush. In dissent, Stevens called the decision a "wound" that would erode public faith in the justices' impartiality. "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," he wrote. "It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."
Stevens also authored the famous dissent in Citizens United v. FEC, a conservative war against campaign-finance reform that opened the door to untold millions of dollars in corporate political expenditures. "A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold," he cautioned in 2010. "The longstanding consensus on the need to limit corporate campaign spending should outweigh the wooden application of judge-made rules." When the Court released its decision, Stevens read from his dissent from the bench, a step justices tend to reserve for the cases about which they feel strongest.
The current Court looks a lot more like the de facto political entity Stevens predicted it would become—and that has generated interest in proposals to pack the Court, impose term limits, or otherwise limit the justices' power. Its newest member, Republican justice Brett Kavanaugh, earned his seat thanks to a full-on embrace of partisanship during his confirmation hearings, when he dismissed credible sexual assault allegations against him as an "orchestrated political hit" designed to get "revenge on behalf of the Clintons." (In an unusual move, Stevens publicly opined that this demonstration of "potential bias" made Kavanaugh unfit for service on the Court.) A decade after Citizens United, given that dark-money groups spent more than a billion dollars during the most recent presidential election—and a single anonymous donor wrote a $17 million check to ensure Kavanaugh's confirmation—Stevens's warnings seem especially prescient.
Today, picking a justice who strays from the president's ideology is seen as a colossal error—one that, with the Court's power at its apex, no president can afford to make. Maybe the highest praise for Stevens, then, came from the Republican who nominated him, and who had no regrets about doing so 30 years later. "I am prepared to allow history's judgment of my term in office to rest (if necessary, exclusively) on my nomination...of Justice John Paul Stevens," President Ford wrote in 2005. "He has served his nation well, at all times carrying out his judicial duties with dignity, intellect, and without partisan political concerns." In such a polarized era, would-be justices with independent streaks like Stevens's stand little chance at confirmation to the Court. For that very reason, the nation seems to have less faith in it.
Originally Appeared on GQ
