Obama Criticizes Liberal Warren & Burger Supreme Courts as "Too Liberal" [View All]

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Obama Says Liberal Courts May Have Overreached

By CHARLIE SAVAGE and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: April 29, 2010


WASHINGTON — In a seeming rejection of liberal orthodoxy, President Obama has spoken disparagingly about liberal victories before the Supreme Court in the 1960s and 1970s — suggesting that justices made the “error” of overstepping their bounds and trampling on the role of elected officials.

Wednesday night against a backdrop of recent Supreme Court rulings in which conservative justices have struck down laws favored by liberals, most notably a January ruling that nullified restrictions on corporate spending to influence elections.
“It used to be that the notion of an activist judge was somebody who ignored the will of Congress, ignored democratic processes, and tried to impose judicial solutions on problems instead of letting the process work itself through politically,” Mr. Obama said.
“And in the ’60s and ’70s, the feeling was — is that liberals were guilty of that kind of approach. What you’re now seeing, I think, is a conservative jurisprudence that oftentimes makes the same error.”

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Mr. Obama’s comments, which came as he prepares to make a Supreme Court nomination, amounted to the most sympathetic statement by a sitting Democratic president about the conservative view that the Warren and Burger courts — which expanded criminal defendant rights, required busing to desegregate schools and declared a right to abortion — were dominated by “liberal judicial activists” whose rulings were dubious.

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Mr. Obama made his remarks in an impromptu conversation with reporters on a flight to Washington from the Midwest. They were in response to a question about whether concerns about “conservative judicial activism” would play a role in the court nomination.

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That troubled some liberals, including Wade Henderson of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. He agreed with Mr. Obama’s definition of “judicial activism,” but said he had “a concern about his effort to establish a moral equivalency between the Warren court and the Roberts court.”

And the president of the liberal Alliance for Justice, Nan Aron, argued that the Warren and Burger courts had helped make progress on economic and social fronts for people who lacked political power, while the Roberts court is “tilted in favor of those who already have power and influence.”

By pegging his critique to the 1960s and 1970s, Mr. Obama stayed away from the most famous liberal Supreme Court ruling, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision striking down school segregation. Still, his statement seemed to call into question subsequent liberal legal victories.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/us/politics/30court.html?ref=todayspaper