With Souter retiring there goes a great legacy of the liberal northeast wing of the Republican wing (AKA the Gypsy Moths)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G…
Thanks to the gaw of Senator Warren Rudman (R-NH)
The Wall Street Journal later editorialized about the appointment, saying: “Mr. Rudman, the man who helped put liberal jurist David Souter on the high court” and who in his “Yankee Republican liberalism” took “pride in recounting how he sold Mr. Souter to gullible White House chief of staff John Sununu as a confirmable conservative. Then they both sold the judge to President Bush, who wanted above all else to avoid a confirmation battle.”[3] Rudman wrote in his memoir that he had “suspected all along” that Souter would not “overturn activist liberal precedents.”[4] Sununu later said, “In spite of it all, he’s a good friend. But I’ve always known that he was more liberal than he liked the world to think he was.
To be fair, he was pretty much in the ‘liberal wing’ of the SC during the last 10 or 15 years. Not even really a moderate. Although theres certainly old school liberal Yankee Republicans whom were ideologically liberal (Chafee comes to mind, Jeffords before his switch…)
is that they tend to “move left” over time. There are exceptions, but by and large conservative justices tend to change their positions as time goes on. My pet theory on this is that “strict constructionist” viewpoints and “originalist” interpretations aren’t practical when applying the constitution. (Of course, it could be for the same reason it happens with those of us who are college educated-reality has a liberal bias and the more you’re exposed to the more you see that.)