Posted on 07/21/2019 6:37:59 PM PDT by Kaslin
Justice John Paul Stevens was the last of the greatest generation. Stevens enlisted in the Navy the day before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He was awarded the Bronze Star for his work as a cryptographer: his codebreaking team’s efforts led to the downing of the plane of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of the Japanese navy and architect of the Pearl Harbor attack.
Stevens would go on to reference his experience as a World War II veteran often in his Supreme Court opinions. Especially memorable was his defense of the American flag in Texas v. Johnson, the 1989 case in which the court held that the First Amendment protected the burning of the flag. Dissenting from the court’s decision, he asserted:
The ideas of liberty and equality have been an irresistible force in motivating leaders like Patrick Henry, Susan B. Anthony, and Abraham Lincoln, schoolteachers like Nathan Hale and Booker T. Washington, the Philippine Scouts who fought at Bataan, and the soldiers who scaled the bluff at Omaha Beach. If those ideas are worth fighting for — and our history demonstrates that they are — it cannot be true that the flag that uniquely symbolizes their power is not itself worthy of protection from unnecessary desecration
In 1975, President Ford nominated Stevens to replace Justice William O. Douglas, an unabashed liberal on a court that was then prone to a high level of judicial activism. In the aftermath of Watergate, Ford was more focused on experience and integrity, both of which Stevens possessed, than judicial philosophy. While Stevens was affiliated with the Republican Party (and certainly considered himself a political conservative), he was never — and never pretended to be — an originalist. And nobody asked Stevens if he was an originalist, because nobody cared if he was.
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Kelo is a litmus test of who rules whom.
Never has a justice appointed by a democrat president “flipped” to conservative.
Greatest Generation are heroes...until proven otherwise. Stevens turned out to be a turd.
Not true, there is one exception.
And the assasination of Admiral Yamamoto - though in accordance with the laws of war (and personally approved by FDR beforehand) is not something I would want to be foremost on my wartime resume.
Byron “Whizzer” White came pretty close.
AKA the Statist Generation because they gave us the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society and brought Big Government into every facet of our lives.
Yeah, the Greatest Generation were those who fought the War, not the leftists among them who did their best to ruin the U.S.
While he ended up being considered "conservative", his opinions were actually mainstream democrat viewpoints at the time.
The democrats went so far to the left, that he was a relic from when there were sensible democrats.
His dissent from Roe v. Wade should be mandatory reading.
He didn't change, the country's political landscape changed.
Too bad that the SC justices appointed by "republicans" often went cuckoo liberal.
Earl Warren, Souter, Stevens, Blackmun, Roberts, etc.
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