4. The Price of Power
There's an obvious reason why Supreme Court confirmation hearings have become increasingly contentious, why so much money flows into state judicial races, and why the confirmation of lower federal court judges has become a perennial campaign issue. Judges are more powerful than they used to be. Their decisions matter more.
Judges, elevated in their priestly robes behind an altar-like bench, occupy a position of nearly religious awe in the United States. Reverance is the key to the public's acceptance of the judiciary's enormous power in American society. But in a democratic society no government official ought to be revered. Reverence of the Supreme Court, in particular, is unhealthy. In the twentieth century the justices' ranks included the anti-Semite James McReynolds, the KKK member Hugo Black, the compulsive self-mythologizer William O. Douglas, the cash-pocketing Abe Fortas, and benchfuls of second-raters. Treating Supreme Court justices as immortals has never made any of them god-like.
In the 1950s Jimmy Byrnes was the segregationist governor of South Carolina. No one, then or later, would have accepted his statements to the press as full and complete explanations for the odious politics he pursued. There is as little reason to accept the opinions he wrote as a Supreme Court justice during the 1940s as full and complete explanations for his exercise of judicial power. The opinions of all the justices, including those with whom we agree, should be read with the same skepticism a veteran journalist brings to the press conferences of South Carolina's current governor, and with the same attention to the words between the lines.
The way to reduce the influence of money in judicial races, and to eliminate the unseemly spectacle of feeding-frenzy confirmation hearings, is simple: return the judiciary to its original role as a forum for deciding which of two litigants wins.
Thursday, November 17, 2005 at 06:15PM in Individual justices, Supreme Court's role
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