Daily Inspiration Quote by Stephen Breyer

“But once the person is selected, at that point that person is independent” is Breyer doing something judges rarely admit in plain language: describing the Court as a legitimacy machine that runs on a carefully timed transformation. Before selection, the nominee is a political object. Everyone pretends it’s meritocratic theater, but the subtext is raw power: appointments are bargaining chips, ideological signals, electoral fuel. Breyer’s pivot phrase, “once,” is the hinge that turns that mess into a story the system needs to tell about itself.

The line’s specific intent is defensive, almost constitutional PR. It reassures the public that the ugliness of confirmation doesn’t contaminate the institution afterward. Breyer is invoking a core American fiction that’s also a functional necessity: that law can be insulated from politics by changing the role, not the person. The nominee is chosen through politics; the justice is supposedly purified by tenure, tradition, and the Court’s internal norms.

What makes it work rhetorically is its calm finality. “At that point” sounds like a clean timestamp, as if independence is an on/off switch rather than a daily discipline. That’s the tell. Breyer knows independence is fragile, maintained through self-restraint and public trust, not merely granted by the job title.

Context matters: Breyer, a Clinton appointee associated with institutionalism and incrementalism, spent years arguing that the Court’s authority depends on appearing nonpartisan. Read against today’s hyper-polarized confirmation battles, the sentence lands less as a description than as a plea: keep believing the conversion is real, because if you stop, the Court becomes just another legislature with robes.