How the Supreme Court shifted

The High Court left for summer break with a flurry of decisions recently that continued to get picked apart in the media. Ed Whelan has a good roundup post over at NRO Bench Memos putting it into reasonable perspective.

If crude political shorthands must be employed, then the Supreme Court’s just-completed term is best summarized as a small step towards the right—and towards the center.  I am not contending that the Court is walking in opposite directions.  Rather, after decades of liberal judicial activism on so many issues, the Court’s position remains decidedly on the left.  Thus, even if the Roberts Court were to take big strides to the right in future terms (a prospect that would require further improvements to the Court’s composition and rather more boldness than the new justices have so far shown), it would still merely be moving towards the center.

Judging positions depends on where the reference point is. For liberals overreacting to this court’s decisions, the reference point has been far left for so long, they no longer had a central axis point. Whelan’s right. Turing to the right at all is returning toward center.

The abortion issue illustrates my point.  As I explain in this essay, the Scalia/Thomas position that the Constitution does not speak to the question of abortion is the centrist, moderate, substantively neutral (as well as correct) position.

Yesterday’s NRO house editorial accurately describes how limited the Court’s progress was this past term.  Unfortunately, the major media coverage has been remarkably hyperbolic and distorted.

These are good articles, so follow the links for more analysis. There are more at Whelan’s Bench Memos post, including one to a critique of a “melodramatic” Los Angeles Times article.

The LA Times article includes the ridiculous claim that President Bush’s “selection of [Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito] appears to have cemented his legacy of a long-term conservative majority on the high court.”  We don’t even have a “conservative majority” now, and any prospect of establishing one requires election of a strong president in 2008.

Which is another good reminder of a critical test to apply to presidential candidates: who they would appoint as judges.