Bookworm Room: The seductive power to do good

Speaking of the Supreme Court, blogger Don Quixote notes:

Bookworm asks why conservative Supreme Court appointees drift to the left but liberal appointees do not drift to the right. Perhaps it's because power doesn't always corrupt, sometimes it seduces.

Chief Justice Warren (an Eisenhower appointee) believed that segregation was wrong (as, I suspect, did most moderate Republicans in 1954). With one stroke of the pen he and his fellow justices could make it illegal. They simply could not resist the temptation to do good, resulting in Brown v. Board of Education.

Justice Douglas (a Roosevelt appointee) couldn't fine a right to privacy in the Constitution, but he knew the world would be a better place if birth control was legal. So he fashioned a right to privacy out of whole cloth, using the now famous penumbras and emanations, and authored Griswold v. Connecticut.

Justice Blackmun (a Nixon appointee) concluded legalizing abortion was a good and proper step for our society to take and used his position on the Court to accomplish the feat. Roe v. Wade was born, and millions of fetuses were not...

Full post, with links