In the nearly 30 years that Justice Stephen Breyer has spent on the Supreme Court it has been conservative, then more conservative and now much more conservative.
The court's rapid rightward shift in recent years was a change for the liberal jurist, who early in his career sat with the same group of eight other justices for more than a decade. But Breyer, who announced his retirement Thursday, said repeatedly that the court should not be seen as political. Judges, he liked to say, are not “junior-league politicians.”
