Wednesday, October 28, 2020

About That Court

 A good friend said to me yesterday that the new Supreme Court justice does have excellent qualifications, meaning legal ones. My response was that it was a given and should be a given that any nominee these days has the traditional academic success story. But teaching at law school and serving as an appellate judge for two years don't really provide much in the way of understanding the problems of ordinary people.  

I don't judge judicial nominees by their academic standing but I do pay attention to their previous decisions and writings. If  a nominee espouses down-the-line extreme conservatism, I'm not interested in how well she did in law school. She denied having fixed positions on major issues; this was ludicrous, because she has written specifically about why certain key past decisions were wrong. You expect her to reconsider those positions? 

We're in for a bad time. We may need a new president to expand the court's membership just as FDR was finally inclined to do after four years of the Four Horsemen of Reaction: Van Devanter, McReynolds, Sutherland, and Butler. And they were only four. Despite what you may read about the "court packing" episode of 1937, it failed not because the public was against it but because FDR muffed it. He didn't even go over it with his legislative leaders or prepare the ground in any way for the effort.

And FDR acted precipitously, without adequate planning as well as spadework, because his strongest political adviser, Louis McHenry Howe, had just died. Louis Howe never would have let him go into this legislative battle without extensive advance work. He would have made sure that depending on the legislator, either he or FDR or both would have button-holed all of them. 

As has been noted, expanding the court has been successfully proposed and effected by Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln. Another proposal in today's paper was to set up screening panels made up of rotating members selected from federal appeals court judges to decide what cases should go to the Supremes. That way, the high court justices cannot put a series of cases on the docket to move toward their own personal ideological goals, as several of the current reactionary bunch have been doing.

It's unlikely that we can ever go back to dealing with court membership apart from total political domination of the process. The cats are out of the bag. It's become increasingly partisan as the GOP has returned to its bad old days of putting extreme reactionaries on the court. Democrats for the most part acted as if things hadn't changed--they nominated candidates who were only slightly left of center or actually in the center. The so-called liberal wing hadn't been so liberal for a long time. But just as with the whole Republican party, their nominees have moved way over to the right. Scalia and Thomas set the pattern.

Now that the Supreme Court has jumped right into the political thicket that Frankfurter claimed with little basis that he tried to avoid, and as to which he was wrong, because gerrymandering won't go away when the pols who drew the district lines are the ones in office. Roberts's claim that the nation didn't  need the Voting Rights Act's preclearing was as much of a lie as Trump's saying the pandemic is over.




 

Two Papers: Their Coverage Diverges More Than Ever

 

For as long as I've lived in Washington, I've had the Washington Post and New York Times delivered every morning. It always was obvious that each had its strong and weak points; over the years, one never seemed clearly superior. But recently, major shifts in the way the Times covers many subjects bolster a strong feeling that the Post has taken a significant lead in quality.

National politics has always been the Post's stock-in-trade. It devotes many pages and many signed columns to this cornerstone of its news and opinion coverage. Both papers, despite having superb reporters covering the White House and environs, have of course devoted far too much attention to the current President. But both have probed and published major exposes of the corruption and malfeasance of this administration. Even the authoritative Bob Woodward, while holding the title of Associate Editor at the Post but not actually on current staff, still produces newsworthy accounts based on direct contact with presidents and their top staff members. 

The Times, however, seems to have fallen off in terms of its full coverage. It has produced some amazing exposes in recent weeks--the President's taxes, for one. Yet when one looked at its front page this morning, Sunday, October 25, the right lead was a story datelined Bethlehem, Pa., about why people there felt the current President had done a fine job with the nation's economy. The reporter apparently spoke to no one who disagreed with this dubious finding. Nor did the story suggest that there might be anyone who differed from this conclusion.

The need for significant improvement in both staff diversity and coverage when addressing gender and race issues was long evident. Now, one can rarely turn to the Times without every other story focused on one or both of these subjects. In the Times's arts coverage, in particular, there rarely seems to be room for anything but these two topics, as important as they are. If we still had satirical magazines, or if satire relating to these sensitive matters were allowed to be published, the Times's total focus on them would be ripe for targeting.

In contrast, the Post has had a columnist for the past year or more who addresses issues relating to how women are treated in our society; for much longer, it has had a succession of columnists who focus on problems of race.  News stories that involve these topics receive full coverage. Eugene Robinson is a top-notch writer and has been so recognized for his perceptivity; Monica Hesse strikes me as a fair-minded writer who has identified important areas where women's rights are threatened or unfulfilled, and dealt with them well.