SUPREME COURT REPORT

Third Issue
Feb 12, 2010


Behaving Better than Bin Laden

Hispanics have finally risen into the top tier of government lawyering. A yet unposted issue noted the rise and role of Alberto Gonzales as our chief law enforcement officer, without saying the title he bore--US Attorney General.

I referred briefly to Gonzales’ role in Bush justice policies after September 11. Some in the US seemed to feel that the terrorists’ killing huge numbers of civilians, rather than focusing on military targets, left us morally free to operate outside the traditional rules of battle and international affairs. The foe is an amorphous, stateless, mobile group, largely not susceptible to being defeated by ordinary military force. They operate in the shadows; so could we. In line with this, University of Utah's Susan Miller points out that torture has been the “business-as-usual” method of punishing and interrogating enemies, time out of mind.

These are points not to be ignored, but I am wary of using them to justify an amoral campaign by a nation that
a) set the model for representative government,
b) urges the expansion of human rights
c) declares itself to be the example for that expansion, and
d) is now in a class of its own as to economic and military power in the world. I think we need to

behave
better than Osama bin Laden,
better than the Japanese who started wars of aggression and forced pilots to commit suicide by kamikaze,
better than Eqyptian or Czech interrogators who may torture their prisoners and treat them inhumanely in dozens of ways that don’t actively qualify under the definition of “torture.”


The White Man’s Playground

Since the first black was put on the Supreme Court in 1967, it has largely remained a White Man’s Playground. There have been about four times as many white appointees as minority ones, and about five times as many men as women. I said President Reagan’s appointing O’Connor reminded me of the Mormon leader changing the rule about black men being priests. Both Reagan and the LDS president continued an ageless pattern of discrimination. Then, under pressure, they gave in one time, and wanted to be treated as if they were fair and equally kind to all groups. They were not!

I noted that conservatives seem to care most about preserving what they see as the purity of the law, and white males seem best able to preserve it. I failed to explain why: For at least 4,000 years, law in European societies and their colonies has been of the white males, by the white males, for the white males. That, far more than a questionable legal pedigree, is why William Kristol was upset by the nomination of Harriet Miers, first nominated to fill the seat now occupied by Samuel Alito. My God, it was pointed out, in 1987 she gave money to a Democrat! Doctrinal adherence, rather than fairness to groups long excluded, was and surely remains Mr. Kristol’s priority. His group temporarily has lost the hegemony by something between five and 15 percentage points of votes cast. This is a grand miracle, given that about 2005 I picked up a hitchhiker near Primm, Nevada, who said, “How come nobody likes us liberals any more?”
Scott Simon in about 2005 said, “Imagine that the Democrats were restored to majority in Congress, oh, 12 years from now.”
I thought that highly unlikely—far too quick. Yet by 2006 John the big government hater predicted forlornly that a Democrat would probably win the presidency in 2008. That Democrat was a black man, and a woman would have won had he not appeared on the scene. After 43 anglo-saxon males in the office, the presidency has temporarily stopped being a White Man’s Playground.