President Obama has made his second appointment to the US Supreme Court. This alone makes him luckier than some of his predecessors. President Jimmy Carter, a fellow Democrat, held office between 1977 and 1981 but, because there were no retirements from the Court during that period, could only nominate judges to the lower tier federal courts.
Kagan took the place of John Paul Stevens. Although Stevens, who turned 90 in April 2010, had been appointed by a Republican president (Gerald Ford) in 1975, he became a trenchant critic of the right and, to all intents and purposes, ‘led’ the Court’s liberal wing. He may have finally decided to retire because he feared that the nomination of a liberal successor might become more troublesome if the Republicans won back a significant number of seats in the Senate.
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