Source: http://www.harryblackmun.info/man.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 04:14:30+00:00

Document:
Courtesy Supreme Court Historical Society.
Harry Blackmun’s time on the Supreme Court was tumultuous not only politically and legally, as the bench swung from left to right and back, but on a personal level, as well.
The two political conservatives maintained their long-distance friendship while Blackmun moved from private practice in Minneapolis to counsel at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, and Burger ascended the ranks of Republican politics to judge on the D.C. Circuit Court. The two still valued their relationships so much that Burger prodded got Blackmun to finally accept a seat on the Eighth Circuit Court. Blackmun’s friendship was so important to Burger that the latter became deeply depressed when Blackmun wouldn’t join him for a jaunt through Europe so Burger could escape his ideological battles on the circuit court.
Blackmun’s lack of fear was vital because the he and Burger came to disagree quite a bit, to say the least. Most of the tension between the two, and between Burger and the rest of the Court, for that matter, was caused by Burger’s increasingly erratic and difficult leadership. These episodes led to extreme delay in deciding or writing opinions, often resulting in seemingly needless rearguments. (When William Rehnquist took over the chief justiceship, rearguments resumed their place as safe, legal, and rare.) For example, in Immigration and Naturalization Services v. Chadha, Burger resisted assigning an opinion or even accepting the majority vote because of his personal discomfort with the case’s implications (it would have overturned the long-respected Congressional veto). He delayed a decision for so long that it had to be put over to the next term without a formal vote. Blackmun took such a strong exception to this that he dissented from the scheduled reargument. The episode led to a passive-aggressive exchange of memos open to the rest of the Court to see, and set the tone for future disagreements and conflicts between the two old friends (154-60).
One of the last issues arose over Blackmun’s staunch defense of Roe v. Wade, as Burger abandoned it. In Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Blackmun, with a narrow majority, overturned an informed consent provision in the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act of 1982. Burger was the lone justice from the majority in Roe who voted to support the Pennsylvania act. In a note to himself, Blackmun wrote, “We reaffirm ... Roe v. Wade, ... from which the Chief Justice—for reasons of his own—has now defected" (183-4).
The final straw came in the capital case Darden v. Wainwright, when Blackmun was more outspoken than ever that the Court should grant certiorari, stay the execution, and eventually overturn the lower court’s decision and rule that Darden was not given a fair trial. Burger had initially written a strong opinion dissenting from the grant of cert, and ended up in the majority as the Court decided to affirm the lower decision. Blackmun wrote a furious dissent, lambasting “this Court’s impatience with the progress of Darden’s constitutional challenges,” and using Burger’s dissent as evidence. In response, Burger wrote a concurring opinion defending his decision, prompting Blackmun to add a footnote to his dissent, reading, “the Chief Justice suggests that he irrevocably had committed himself to rejecting those claims” before the case was argued in full. The next day, June 17, 1986, Burger announced his resignation (172-3).
Their correspondence after that was almost nonexistent. Blackmun sent an eloquent but cool congratulatory letter to the Burgers for their sixtieth wedding anniversary. It took Burger a month to respond, and the letter was signed by his secretary (185-6).
Blackmun later wrote, in a written tribute after Burger’s death, “I do not know what he expected, but surely he could not have anticipated that I would be an ideological clone. He knew me better than that. But when disagreement came, his disappointment was evident and not concealed” (186-7).
Indeed, Blackmun disagreed with Burger a great deal—but not at first. Blackmun voted with Burger in 87.5% of the Court’s closest cases in his first five terms, but only 32.4% in their last five terms together. Blackmun became a bit closer to Brennan in the “Minnesota Twins’” five middle terms together, but ended up voting with Brennan 70.6% of the time in those final terms.
Blackmun’s transformation from an independent legalist to a champion of civil liberties and civil rights was most evident in his evolving interpretation of women’s rights, but was part of a broader trend merely spurred by Roe v. Wade. Defending homosexual rights in Bowers v. Hardwick, Blackmun strongly dissented for the Court’s four “liberals” that “the Court really has refused to recognize ... the fundamental interest all individuals have in controlling the nature of their intimate association with others.” After Blackmun took the somewhat extreme step of announcing his dissent from the bench, Thurgood Marshall wrote him an approving memo that read, “You was great.” This was in contrast to a decision thirteen years earlier, while Blackmun was writing Roe, that Marshall dissented strongly from Blackmun’s opinion in United States v. Kras, which upheld a fee for filing for bankruptcy, even for the perpetually indigent. Marshall wrote that “the majority”—Blackmun’s majority—did not understand the plight of the poor. Now, in Bowers, Marshall expressed the opposite sentiment about Blackmun—that he could actually identify with those in a different position (109).
Indeed, Blackmun became known for compassion, not constructionism. The shift may have begun with Blackmun’s always staunch defense of Roe, as his defense of one civil liberty led to others. With poverty, Blackmun took his interpretation of a woman’s right to abortion to a new level, which, in turn, elevated his expression of sympathy. He dissented from the Court’s opinion in Beal v. Doe, which denied an indigent woman access to state funding for an abortion that was not medically necessary. Decrying “condescension” of a “Let them eat cake” variety, he wrote, “There is another world ‘out there,” the existence of which the Court, I suspect, either chooses to ignore or fears to recognize. And so the cancer of poverty will continue to grow. This is a sad day for those who regard the Constitution as a force that would serve justice to all evenhandedly and, in so doing, would better the lot of the poorest among us." Blackmun’s now unshakeable belief in a woman’s right to make her own health choices was extending his compassion to new disadvantaged classes.
The groups receiving the most defense from Blackmun became women, doctors, and death row inmates. To continue reading about Blackmun’s personal priorities as a man and a judge, please follow one of these links.

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