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The New York Times
Justice Denied
EDITORIAL,
nytimes.com on the Web, July 5, 2007
In the 1960s, Chief Justice Earl
Warren presided over a Supreme Court that interpreted the Constitution in ways
that protected the powerless — racial and religious minorities, consumers,
students and criminal defendants. At the end of its first full term, Chief
Justice John Roberts’s court is emerging as the Warren court’s mirror image.
Time and again the court has ruled, almost always 5-4, in favor of corporations
and powerful interests while slamming the courthouse door on individuals and
ideals that truly need the court’s shelter.
President Bush created this radical new court with two appointments in quick
succession: Mr. Roberts to replace Chief Justice William Rehnquist and
Samuel Alito to replace the far less conservative Sandra Day O’Connor.
The Roberts court’s resulting sharp shift to the right began to be strongly felt
in this term. It was on display, most prominently, in the school
desegregation ruling last week. The Warren court, and even the Rehnquist
court of two years ago, would have upheld the integration plans that Seattle and
Louisville, Ky., voluntarily adopted. But the Roberts court, on a 5-4
vote, struck them down, choosing to see the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection
clause — which was adopted for the express purpose of integrating blacks more
fully into society — as a tool for protecting white students from integration.
On campaign finance, the court handed a major victory to corporations and
wealthy individuals — again by a 5-4 vote — striking down portions of the law
that reined in the use of phony issue ads. The ruling will make it easier
for corporations and lobbyists to buy the policies they want from Congress.
Corporations also won repeatedly over consumers and small stockholders.
The court overturned a jury’s award of $79.5 million in punitive damages against
Philip Morris. The Oregon Supreme Court had upheld the award, calling
Philip Morris’s 40 years of denying the connection between smoking and cancer
“extraordinarily reprehensible.”
In a ruling that will enrich companies at the expense of consumers, the court
overturned — again by a 5-4 vote — a 96-year-old rule that manufacturers cannot
impose minimum prices on retailers.
The flip side of the court’s boundless solicitude for the powerful was its often
contemptuous attitude toward common folks looking for justice. It ruled
that an inmate who filed his appeal within the deadline set by a federal judge
was out of luck, because the judge had given the wrong date — a shockingly
unjust decision that overturned two court precedents on missed deadlines.
When Chief Justice Roberts was nominated, his supporters insisted that he
believed in “judicial modesty,” and that he could not be put into a simple
ideological box. But Justice Alito and he, who voted together in a
remarkable 92 percent of nonunanimous decisions, have charted a thoroughly
predictable archconservative approach to the law. Chief Justice Roberts
said that he wanted to promote greater consensus, but he is presiding over a
court that is deeply riven.
In the term’s major abortion case, the court upheld — again by a 5-4 vote — the
federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, even though the court struck down a
nearly identical law in 2000. In the term’s major church-state case, the
court ruled 5-4 that taxpayers challenging the Bush administration’s faith-based
initiatives lacked standing to sue, again reversing well-established precedents.
In a few cases, notably ones challenging the Bush administration’s hands-off
approach to global warming and executions of the mentally ill, Justice Anthony
Kennedy broke with the conservative bloc. But that did not happen often
enough.
It has been decades since the most privileged members of society — corporations,
the wealthy, white people who want to attend school with other whites — have had
such a successful Supreme Court term. Society’s have-nots were not the
only losers. The basic ideals of American justice lost as well.
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