[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Off the Bench

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Off the Bench

August 29, 2004
 By DAHLIA LITHWICK 



 

And with a blink, summer's over. A chill touches the air,
sunlight softens to gold, and brightly colored war
protesters begin to drop from the trees in Central Park. 

Presidential candidates are everywhere - in our stadiums
and town halls, clogging up our parks and porches, our
televisions and our computer screens. Every baby is kissed;
every hand shaken. They beg us to know them, to peer inside
their hearts and really understand who they are. 

Which makes it all the more arresting that nine Supreme
Court justices have just spent another summer like
vacationing Greek gods, frolicking among us, blending right
in. 

"What do U.S. Supreme Court justices do each summer?" you
ask. A good question, raising, implicitly, a better
question: What do they do, ever? Where do they live? What
do they read? What are their favorite shows? Do they speak
in declarative sentences around the dinner table - or only
in strings of Socratic hypotheticals? 

The Supreme Court is by far the most mysterious branch of
government - its members glimpsed only rarely, like
Bigfoot, crashing through the forest at twilight. The court
is the one branch that operates in near secrecy - no
cameras, no tape recorders, no explanations, no press
conferences, rare interviews, no review by other branches.
The most powerful branch is also the most enigmatic. They
love it that way. 

So how do the justices spend their summers? Some travel to
exotic locales, where they get paid lots of money to teach
at fabulous seaside summer law school programs. Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg taught at Hofstra University law
school's program in Nice, France, this summer, while Chief
Justice William H. Rehnquist taught at Tulane's program at
Cambridge. 

What else do they do with their summers? Since all four
justices over age 70 are hostages to their
mutually-assured-destruction refusal to retire (each
unwilling to give an opposing president the chance to fill
a seat), they probably do lots of resting. Even one extra
day on that court may mean casting the deciding vote in
Bush v. Kerry - a case poised to detonate over the legal
landscape this winter, the moment the recount starts in
Ohio. 

Shunning travel and speeches, Justice David Souter - the
man who says cameras will be rolled into the Supreme Court
only over his dead body - hightails it home to New
Hampshire each summer, where, like Punxsutawney Phil's New
England cousin, he'll hide out until the first Monday in
October. Justice Souter will under no circumstances be
found in a Louisiana duck blind, where Justice Antonin
Scalia is rumored to spend his summers hunting with his pal
Dick Cheney. 

Moreover, that rumor is totally unfair to Justice Scalia.


Duck season in Louisiana doesn't start until November. 

Perhaps the most emblematic justice is Clarence Thomas, who
spends much of his summer touring the country in a used bus
that's been converted into a luxury motor home. That bus is
the perfect symbol for a man who won't read newspapers, or
engage audiences that don't share his ideology. It allows
him to roam the country, hermetically sealed and
unreachable inside a moving fortress. 

Ultimately, that's what members of the Supreme Court do
each summer - they roam the world, safe with their secrets,
secure in their lifetime appointments, unaccountable and
unavailable to voters or presidents. 

And just as the presidential candidates beg you to know
them - to look deep in their eyes and see their souls - the
Supreme Court justices beg to be forgotten. They still
believe that their sole authority rests in the myth that
they are oracles. That's why it's not in their interest to
remind you that you'll be picking the next Supreme Court
with your vote come November. We forget that appointing
judges may be the single most important thing a president
does - it's easy to forget it when they've fixed it so you
can't even pick Anthony Kennedy out of a lineup. 

(He's the guy who looks like Ken Starr.) 

Trust me,
beneath their sunblock, and their duck hats, sit the nine
most powerful, secretive public officials in this land. And
whether you can name them or not is immaterial. Because
after November, that president whose soul you've come to
know so well is going to start naming a whole lot of their
successors. 

Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor at Slate, is a guest
columnist during August. Thomas L. Friedman is on leave
until October, writing a book. Maureen Dowd is on vacation.


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/opinion/29lithwick.html?ex=1094793156&ei=1&en=0021a6c7a4378be7


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