There will never be another David Souter on the Supreme Court.
Indeed, the Republican appointee’s liberal votes made “no more Souters” a GOP rallying cry for judicial nominations going forward.
He was appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1990. But his votes in a series of cases over the years made him a cautionary tale for Republicans. The court’s recent decisions are proof that the party learned its lesson, having amassed a GOP supermajority that, among many other things, overturned abortion rights in 2022.
Republicans still lash out these days at occasional defections from Chief Justice John Roberts and the Trump appointees. But those newer justices were all vetted to an extent that they would not be “Souters.”
Roberts said this of Souter’s passing Thursday at age 85:
Justice David Souter served our Court with great distinction for nearly twenty years. He brought uncommon wisdom and kindness to a lifetime of public service. After retiring to his beloved New Hampshire in 2009, he continued to render significant service to our branch by sitting regularly on the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit for more than a decade. He will be greatly missed.
The mild-mannered New Englander’s retirement in 2009 was also emblematic of the era he left behind (or, that left him behind). A Democrat, Barack Obama, was president at the time. That cleared the way for Obama to nominate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who sits today as part of the three-justice Democratic minority. Likewise signifying this bygone era, Obama’s other appointment, Elena Kagan, replaced Justice John Paul Stevens in 2010; Stevens, who died in 2019, was appointed by Republican President Gerald Ford and, like Souter, came to align with the court’s liberal wing.It would be shocking if any current justices deliberately retired while a president of the opposing party is in office. Today, the court is more precisely split along party lines. That partisan hardening is what lets us describe the court’s actions in big cases occurring along party lines, as opposed to the vaguer “conservative” and “liberal” labels. That’s an uncomfortable fact for some, but it’s nonetheless a legacy of the “no more Souters” campaign. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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