In the post mortems of the Obama presidency relatively few analysts have pointed to what I think is likely to President Obama’s most influential accomplishment and the one most likely to endure: the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized same sex marriage in all fifty states.
I agree with Mr. Dooley’s observation that even the Supreme Court reads the election returns. The modern version of that is that the Supreme Court pays attention to opinion polls. When President Obama announced his change of heart on the issue of same sex marriage, public opinion, particularly among blacks, public opinion on it began to rise and that made the Supreme Court decision possible.
I also think it’s likely to persist if only because of the social upheaval that would result if it were reversed.
Well, well, well. I’ve been thinking that as well. It’s too bad a basic piece of social justice came as a result of cynical posturing and was then ornamented with the silly transgender bathroom crap. But you know what they say about sausage making.
It will be interesting to see if doctrinaire conservatives waste their energies on Quixotic efforts to repeal it. I doubt they will get any traction with Trump, even though we all know what a hateful, stupid brown shirt he is………
I suppose we can give Obama some credit for Obergefell given that he appointed two of the Justices that were in the majority in that decision, but that’s really all he did. Any other Democratic President would have likely appointed Justices in the same ideological mold as Kagan and Sotomayor.
One thing I do think he deserves credit for is the rapproachment with Cuba. It was clear long ago that the embargo that began when Kennedy was President didn’t make sense in a post Cold War world and that the United States was only harming itself by not allowing American businesses to compete with companies from Europe, Canada, and elsewhere for what seems as though it will be an inevitable modernization of an island nation that has been seemingly locked in the same place it was when Batista was overthrown. The question, of course, is whether or not the Trump Administration will try to reverse course on that policy.
President Obama’s legacy will look a little different in 20 – 40 years. Most of the negativity will have been forgotten, and his accomplishments will be ranked differently.
How many people remember what a dirtbag Nixon was. When I say that his bones should be dug up, ground into dust, and dumped into the ocean, I get blank stares, at best. While he was alive, his head should have been chopped off, and his body should have been drawn and quartered. Then, his head should still be on a pike at the entrance to the White House as a warning to other presidents, and the quarter’s of his body displayed as a warning to anybody thinking of becoming president. Now, how many of you think that was a little harsh?
NOTE: Any chance I get for an anti-Nixon rant, I take it, but I am NOT comparing President Obama to Dirtbag Nixon. I would compare him to President Carter, but who knows. He might be the FDR of the 21st Century.
Doug:
It was decided 5-4. IMO it wouldn’t have taken a lot for it to go the other way. I don’t buy your “inevitability of history” argument expressed above.
Without President Obama’s endorsement I’m not convinced that Kennedy would have decided as he did.
Dave,
Yes it was a 5-4 decision, but the deciding vote came from a Reagan appointee. And I’m not sure how influenced Justice Kennedy was by President Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage given the fact that he has a long history of siding with LGBT rights in previous cases starting with Romer v. Evans, in which he was part of the majority that struck down a Colorado law that purported to bar local jurisdictions from passing laws prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation and continued with Lawrence v. Texas, the case which struck down anti-sodomy laws, and United States v. Whitney, which struck down the most important part of the Defense of Marriage Act. Given this seemingly libertarian mindset on his part in cases involving LGBT rights, it would have actually been a surprise if he had gone the other way on Obergefell.
If the decision was influenced by poll-reading, it may be relevant that exit polls, I believe dating back to 2004, showed that a majority of Republicans supported gay marriage, though mostly if its called something else. And IIRC, a majority of people in the country at the time of Obergefell lived in a jurisdiction where gay marriage/civil unions were legal.
I agree w/ Doug that Kennedy is the most libertarian justice, both right- and left- libertarian. I suspect if there is any hesitation it would be to his left. There is some desire to avoid a repeat of Roe v. Wade among liberal justices, they want to be more cautious. But Roe overruled the law in just about every state at the time.
BTW, I don’t believe that justices decide along party lines. I don’t even believe that they vote along ideological lines. I believe that ideological considerations have some influence on their decisions, a somewhat different proposition.
Somewhere along the line Americans have come to believe that all or nearly all of the justices of the Supreme Court vote along party lines, something for which I don’t see a great deal of evidence.
PD,
Interestingly, even Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said publicly that she now believes that it’s possible that Roe went too far at the time, implying that the nation wasn’t ready for such a far-reaching decision.
This would seem to confirm that Dave is right that public opinion does play at least some part in how the Justices approach cases and how they make their decisions. But I think we already knew that even if they’ve never admitted it publicly.
Dave,
I think that perception exists because so many of the most high-profile cases end up being decided on what appears to the outside world to be a party line basis. If you look at the entirety of what the Court decides in a given Term, though, you’ll always find alliances and agreement that would seem odd to the person who holds to the “party line” hypothesis. Under Chief Justice Roberts, for example, there have been a significant number of unanimous or near-unanimous decisions, and many cases where you see the “conservative” or “liberal” wing of the Court split on particular points of law.
It’s also noteworthy that the Supreme Court seems to be the last part of official Washington where friendship across ideological lines is common.
IMO there are two sitting justices for whom an argument could be made that they vote along party lines: Sotomayor and Thomas. Both of them have joined in unanimous decisions that have gone against their respective parties’ presumed preferences. In my eyes that effectively refutes the party line hypothesis of Supreme Court justice decision-making.
Nope, you guys are wrong. It was Obamacare. Even if it gets repealed, it forces the GOP to come up with a plan. Prior to Obamacare they were never going to do that. Now they are trapped. I would also argue that it has moved the window on a lot of aspects about health care. Many of its parts are so popular it will be difficult for the GOP to not adopt them.
I would also give him credit for keeping us out of another big ground war. Under normal circumstances a negative accomplishment doesn’t merit much, but after the fiasco of the prior administration, and the continued dominance of the neocon/liberal adventurers in Congress, I think that was not as easy a task to accomplish as many would think. Cuba, as Doug noted, was also a big deal, along with the Iran deal.
Steve