Seeing a lot of "Buttigieg wasn't saying Kennedy was the kind of justice he wanted, he was saying he was a non-partisan/moderate/swing justice" takes out there. But he wasn't. Kennedy was a conservative justice.
The Court's ideological divide is stark, and has been for decades. Kennedy was a member of the Court's conservative wing. He was a less reliable vote for that wing than most, at a time when the other justices were split 4-4, but he was still an ideological conservative.
By the same token, Buttigieg's other example of "justices who think for themselves" is just as bad, but in the other direction—David Souter wasn't a maverick on the Court. He was a liberal. A liberal appointed by a Republican, but still a liberal.
Buttigieg's valorization of Kennedy and Souter isn't based on immersion in their opinions or their judicial philosophies. It's knee-jerk "moderation is by definition independent" bullshit—and even by the standards of the genre it's garbage.
Like Buttigieg's court-packing plan, his characterization of Souter and Kennedy is an ignorant, arrogant, fatuous person's idea of thoughtfulness.
Buttigieg's premise is that you can measure how much of a partisan hack a justice is by measuring their distance from the Court's ideological center. It's a false and insipid premise.
As the man said, extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice no virtue.
(And yes, I know who said it. Don't @ me.)
