Justice Anthony Kennedy is retiring a villain to the left. That’s partly due to a spate of final Supreme Court decisions this summer in which he agreed that the First Amendment applies to Americans—even if those Americans happen to run a pro-life pregnancy center or own a bakery—but mostly due to his creation of an opening for a constitutionalist to take his seat on the court.
Conservatives are are happy, even giddy, for those same reasons, and many are highlighting Kennedy’s opinions in cases involving gun rights and Obamacare as the “good” part of his legacy. But not all Supreme Court cases are equal. There are decisions that are such a great offense to the text of the Constitution and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence that they ought to overwhelm a justice’s legacy. For Kennedy, that decision was Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 opinion upholding Roe v. Wade.
