Its no surprise that the Corporatist Press should outdo themselves in praise of Anthony Kennedy. Mr. Rosen’s credentials are stellar in the Neo-Liberal terms of Market Fetishism wedded to Academic status:

Jeffrey Rosen is a contributing editor for The Atlantic. He is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center and a professor of law at the George Washington University.

In the Age of Trump even the Republican Leadership almost looks ‘reasonable’. But elided from Mr. Rosen’s embarrassing hagiography is  Kennedy’s ‘Citizens United’ decision.

As the in-order-too of not looking like the lair he is/was before the Senate Judiciary Committee, John Robert’s appointed Kennedy as the lead in ‘Citizens United‘ case. The fact of Robert’s, not just praise but fealty, toward stare decisis  as part of his self-presentation before the senators is a lie that he acted upon, when the memory of his pronouncement had past into the oblivion of inconvenient history.  An utter inconvenience to Rosen’s kow-towing to Kennedy, as some kind of answer to the specter of Robert Bork.  But the pièce de résistance is this:

The law professor Akhil Amar has called the sunny Californian a combination of Jimmy Stewart, Ronald Reagan, and Earl Warren, whom Kennedy knew as a child.

I once saw a video where Mr. Amar referred to Kennedy as ‘Tony’. Friendship with the powerful can corrupt the faculty of judgement!

The concluding paragraph of Mr. Rosen’s essay is a model of the kind of praise reserved for the reputation of a public servant, or more realistically a Platonic Guardian,  in need of  a fresh application of white wash.

There will be plenty of time to assess the impact of Kennedy’s successor on the Constitution and the law. On the day of his retirement, Kennedy deserves America’s thanks for believing that all citizens, regardless of party or faction, can unite around the ideals Americans share, rooted in the U.S. Constitution.

See the repeal of Korematsu, as reported in The New York Times, which refers to Sotomayor’s dissent:

The court’s liberals denounced the decision. In a passionate and searing dissent from the bench, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the decision was no better than Korematsu v. United States, the 1944 decision that endorsed the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The court’s liberals denounced the decision. In a passionate and searing dissent from the bench, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the decision was no better than Korematsu v. United States, the 1944 decision that endorsed the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Here is how the majority attempted to ‘explain’  the Korematsu decision: