Many Of You May Be Interested In What THIS Guy Has To Say, Re: FISA/NSA/Snowden...

[muriel_volestrangler]

138. Feldman is a liberal

He wants a much more progressive Supreme Court.

Imagining a Liberal Court

After decades of stagnation, progressive constitutional thought is reaching a crisis point. Consider that the two great “liberal” justices who retired from the Supreme Court most recently — David Souter in the spring of 2009 and John Paul Stevens a year later — were conservatives. Not only were both appointed by Republican presidents, but both also subscribed loosely to the adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” With a handful of exceptions, neither favored identifying new constitutional rights where none existed before. Their status as liberals came from the fact that, as the court on which they served tilted to the right, they held their ground as moderate Republicans, consistently voting to sustain the constitutional rights that were discovered by the Supreme Court before they were on it. To be sure, without their votes, the liberal constitutional legacy of the period stretching roughly from Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 to Roe v. Wade in 1973 would have been reversed. But Souter and Stevens were not independent forces for progressive change in American life.

To a great extent, the crisis of liberal thought on the Supreme Court is a result of liberalism’s success. From the time that Franklin Roosevelt’s appointees came to form a majority on the Supreme Court until the appointees of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan came to predominate, liberal constitutional thinking had two major objectives — both of which it largely achieved. First, it sought to give bite to the 14th Amendment’s promise to extend to all persons the equal protection of laws. The Brown decision voiding racial segregation in schools as unconstitutional was the most famous piece of the court’s push for equality. The same ideal was also encompassed in holdings that demanded “one person, one vote” and — more controversially — that upheld affirmative action as consistent with the values of the Constitution.
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More alarming is the fact that, over the past couple of decades, evident gains from deregulation have made many lawyers — progressive and conservative alike — too complacent about deferring to the markets on which our economy depends. That markets work well in so many contexts has strengthened the traditional conservative argument about the constitutional duty to respect private economic transactions — even in the minds of many liberals. Civil libertarian commitments, meanwhile, have become increasingly absolutist, leading some liberals to favor extending basic rights to corporations, not just to individuals. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, has long urged the Supreme Court to treat corporations just like individuals when it comes to political speech.

To address these challenges, progressive constitutional thought must discover (or rediscover) a core set of beliefs about the right relationship between government, the individual and the powerful corporate entities that operate under the umbrella of the market. Reregulation, embraced by the Obama administration to address a range of serious economic and environmental dangers, demands its own set of constitutional explorations and explanations. A truly progressive constitutional project needs to go beyond simply upholding regulations challenged in court. It demands that the Supreme Court and other bodies acknowledge the government’s responsibility to protect our democracy from the harmful side effects of all-powerful markets.

http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/spotlight/constitutional-law/imagining-a-liberal-court.html