Constitutional scholar

Linda Greenhouse's column today, on her interpretation of Pres. Obama's "activist judges" remarks on Air Force One recently, is way too nuanced and interesting to be excerpted, but...whatever.

In that 2001 Chicago radio discussion, State Senator Obama observed that although people often described the Warren court as radical, “it wasn’t that radical.”

He continued: “It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way — that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you; it says what the federal government can’t do to you; but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted. One of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that.”

When the audio of those remarks suddenly and mysteriously appeared on YouTube during the 2008 presidential campaign, the right-wing blogosphere echoed with faux shockwaves along the lines of: “Obama says Warren court not radical enough.”

It is certainly possible to take issue with the president’s view of civil rights history. In fact, the civil rights movement was not fixated solely on the courts; a great deal of legislative work went into achieving such landmark statutes as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court had the wisdom to uphold against non-trivial challenges. The progress of those years might be seen in retrospect as a rare and indispensable partnership among the three branches of government.

In any event, those days are gone, and the next chapter of Supreme Court history is about to unfold. The president doesn’t think the Warren court was insufficiently radical, and he doesn’t think that all judicial activism is the same. That’s his version of the framers’ original intent, and at this moment, his view is the one that counts.

Though, really, read the whole thing. I have no clue as to who Obama will choose to replace Justice Stevens. I am confident, though, he'll choose someone who shares his overall constitution (pun intended) -- a non-ideological progressive (yes, there are such things), pragmatic, with an un-romantic view of the role of the Court. Not everyone on the left will like him or her (and, predictably, no on the right will), but I trust he'll make a solid choice.