William Livingston Quotes
A Man … is not half so intent upon reforming the Abuses of his own Party, as discerning the Errors of his Enemies. To view the Virtues of the Side he espouses, he uses the magnifying End of the Perspective; but inverts the Tube, when he surveys those of his Adversaries
William Livingston, 1723-1790, Governor of New Jersey, Member of the First and Second Continental Congress, “Of Party Divisions,” The Independent Reflector, February 22, 1753
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In his boisterous dissent he read from the bench in the EPA v. EME Homer City case, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, made a mistake and in citing a previous opinion he had written, he made an error recalling what he had written previously. Critics of the justice not only castigated him but made fun of his seemingly foolish error that a law student should not make. Whalen’s quotation is important because it illustrated the highly partisan tone in American politics at that. Whalen, a partisan conservative explains how he would do the same thing if a liberal judge made a mistake. The error was corrected in the final published version of the opinion, and it did not affect the logic of the dissent or even the factual arguments for the dissent. Yet the quest for partisan advantage and trashing a political opponent was so in vogue that a minor mistake was treated as a major political scandal. The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st were not the most partisan and nasty era of American politics but it was one of the worst.
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William Livingston was an American politician who served as the Governor of New Jersey (1776–1790) during the American Revolutionary War and was a signer of the United States Constitution.
