To the Editor:
Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion on affirmative action (“Justices Uphold Race-Aware Admissions,” front page, June 24) provides a healthy reminder. While I applaud what I consider the wisdom of his call, I’m even more grateful for what it illustrates: the crucial value of a justice who takes a less ideological approach to each case, whose decisions can actually be “unexpected.”
Justice Kennedy is often the swing vote, sometimes siding with the more liberal members of the court and sometimes with the conservatives. My instinctive liberal side wishes he would more consistently swing that way, but my dispassionate, citizen side appreciates his willingness to consider each case on its own merits.
Disinterested judgment, employed or arrived at in spite of one’s political or moral inclinations, is a behavior to be treasured. Our next president could do worse than heed that lesson when he or she nominates a new justice.
JAMIE SPENCER
St. Louis
Note from KBJ: Do progressives think before they write? This letter writer claims to appreciate unexpected, nonideological decisions. Has an unexpected, nonideological decision ever emanated from the pen of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, or Elena Kagan? They are as predictable as a machine, as rigid as a steel pipe, as ideological as Karl Marx, and as stupid as a stump.
