A Supreme Court Transformed

The New York Times ^ | Sept. 13, 2018 | Linda Greenhouse

[centurion316]

So it’s all over but the voting. I’m writing this column on the assumption that Judge Brett Kavanaugh will soon be Justice Kavanaugh, despite the Democrats’ continuing efforts to convert a futile battle over ideology into an ugly one over transparency and ethics. By the first Monday in October or soon thereafter, the Roberts court version 5.0 (accounting for the earlier arrival of Justices Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch since Chief Justice John Roberts took his seat in September 2005) will be underway. What then? Most answers to the “What then?” question have offered side-by-side comparisons of Brett Kavanaugh and the justice he will be succeeding, Anthony Kennedy. What part of Justice Kennedy’s 30-year legacy will he embrace? What part will he repudiate? I’d like to shift the field of vision and consider the impact of Judge Kavanaugh’s arrival on the eight other justices — on the dynamic of the Supreme Court as a whole. Justice Byron White, who saw 13 new justices take their seats during his own 31-year tenure, once remarked that every time a new justice joins the court, “it’s a different court.”

[Albion Wilde]

We probably need one or two more seats to really cement a conservative majority. Then the battle will shift to bureaucracy versus the courts.

And then, may bureaucracy lose that battle.

[Crucial]

If it’s already Doomsday for the Dems, they shouldn’t mind another conservative justice on the Court.