There will be a retirement when the Supreme Court of the United States ends its current term this summer. No, we aren’t saying that any one of the nine justices will be vacating a lifetime seat when they adjourn in June. Rather, the face that will change at One First Street will be on the other side of the bench -- in the press gallery.

In February, Linda Greenhouse, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Supreme Court correspondent, announced that she was accepting a buyout package from the New York Times, offered to reduce the Gray Lady’s newsrooms costs. By most accounts, Greenhouse is, and has been, the leading and most influential reporter covering the Supreme Court for a generation. Indeed, not only has she covered the justices at what is regarded to be the “national newspaper of record” for nearly three decades, but some have even suggested that her reporting has had so great an influence that it has even affected the legal luminaries and the decisions they hand down -- the very subjects of her beat.

Dubbed the “Greenhouse effect,” the theory is that Greenhouse’s injection of her own liberal viewpoints into her position as the correspondent of record at the most elite of news organizations has led some justices to seek her approval, maybe without their even knowing it. In other words, the idea is that, since Greenhouse is essentially writing the history of the High Court day by day and decision by decision, some justices may want to be remembered as one of the heroes, as opposed to one of the villains.

There can be little doubt that Greenhouse is, and always has been, a liberal. And, as the High Court has turned right, it has become increasingly clear through her writings that Greenhouse longs for the days gone by of the Warren Court, when the Constitution was but another means to the end of a politically left agenda. In fact, in a widely publicized flap in 2006, Greenhouse all but admitted liberal news bias after giving a speech accepting an award at Harvard University.

To that audience, Greenhouse lamented that her generation of the 1960s had failed miserably “when our turn came to run the country.” For emphasis, Greenhouse noted that she had reached her conclusion even “before we knew the worst of it, before it was clear the extent to which our government had turned its energy and attention away from upholding the rule of law and toward creating law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and other places around the world.” And, she reminded her apparently friendly and similarly liberal audience to “not forget the sustained assault on women’s reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism.”

The comments, themselves, were surprising, coming as they did from a reporter who covered these issues and how they were handled at the Court. But the real shock came when it was time for Greenhouse to answer for those colorful -- and far from objective -- comments. When the newspaper’s public editor asked for an explanation, Greenhouse couldn’t understand how anyone could object. “Ms. Greenhouse told me she considers her remarks to be 'statements of fact' -- not opinion -- that would be allowed to appear in a Times news article,” Byron Calame wrote in response. That’s right, Greenhouse apparently didn’t see it as anything other than a “statement of fact” that conservative viewpoints -- even those being expressed in High Court decisions -- were simply wrong.

Of course, come the next first Monday in October, when the next Supreme Court term is gaveled into session, Greenhouse’s coverage of the justices on the pages of the New York Times, and whatever influence she wielded, will be past. But that is not to say anything will change in the liberal bias of the Supreme Court coverage at the New York Times.

Last Friday, the newspaper’s management announced that Greenhouse’s successor will be Adam Liptak, already a well-known legal reporter and commentator at the Times. In the internal announcement of Liptak’s appointment, the Times’ Washington Bureau Chief, Dean Baquet, noted that, in his opinion, Liptak shared the same “precise qualities that make Linda [Greenhouse] such a great reporter.” Now, we understand that Baquet wasn’t talking about Greenhouse’s infamous liberal slant that flows freely through her body of work. But, based on Liptak’s past writing, Liptak certain seems to share that quality, as well.

Indeed, less than a week after being named the Times’ incoming Supreme Court correspondent, Liptak penned a piece under the headline “Power to Build Border Fence Is Above All U.S. Law, for Now.” If that headline wasn’t provocative enough, the lead to the article reads, dripping with disdain: “Securing the nation’s borders is so important, Congress says, that Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, must have the power to ignore any laws that stand in the way of building a border fence. Any laws at all.” Liptak even goes so far later in his writing to throw another liberal log on the fire by baldly claiming that with respect to illegal immigration and the border fence, Congress has “granted the executive branch more of the sort of unilateral power that the Bush administration has so often claimed for itself.”

Of course, there is plenty more liberal bias where that came from throughout Liptak’s writings. So, when Liptak is the new face of the New York Times at the Supreme Court next fall, don’t expect to be reading anything different. Instead, it will turn out that this High Court retirement, at least, will not have changed much at all.