Retired Supreme Court docket Justice Stephen Breyer poses for a photograph with Supreme Court docket Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Supreme Court docket on June 30.
Photograph:
Fred Schilling/U.S. Supreme Court docket/Related Press
We didn’t typically agree with Supreme Court docket Justice
Stephen Breyer,
however tip a cap to his honorable 58-year profession that included stints in all three branches of presidency. Justice Breyer, age 83, resigned at midday on Thursday to make method for his successor, Justice
Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Justice Breyer’s 28 years on the Excessive Court docket had been knowledgeable by his time working within the Justice Division’s Antitrust Division and on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the place he helped decontrol airways within the late Nineteen Seventies. As a choose he was a pragmatist keen on balancing assessments, not an ideologue. He broke ranks to rule for spiritual liberty in Trinity Lutheran (2017). His law-and-economics view of antitrust would possibly quickly be sorely missed.
He appears to have been a great colleague. At his last oral argument in April, Chief Justice
John Roberts
gave an emotional farewell, noting Justice Breyer’s penchant for absurd hypotheticals. “This sitting alone,” the Chief stated, “has introduced us radioactive muskrats and John the Tiger Man.” Within the EPA’s local weather case determined Thursday, Justice Breyer started a question this manner: “Suppose they began off in saying we’re regulating the promoting of 4-foot cigars smoked by hookahs, OK?” Umm . . . OK.
He defended the judiciary’s legitimacy and opposed court-packing. “Structural alteration motivated by the notion of political affect can solely feed that latter notion,” he stated final yr, at an important second when the political left was embracing proposals that will politicize the Court docket. The left picked up the partisan chant of “Breyer, retire,” and he did so when there can be a liberal substitute.
Seeing him bow to realpolitik has a tinge of unhappiness, since solely in 2020 did he arrive because the Court docket’s senior liberal, with the ability to assign massive opinions, together with to himself. Justice Jackson’s judicial file is skinny, so conservatives would possibly find yourself lacking his pragmatism. However after 28 years, Justice Breyer has earned time along with his grandchildren—or a quiet day on his porch puffing 4-foot cigars by a hookah.
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