206. Forbidden City

Judge James Robertson of the D.C. federal district court ruled that the United States' currency was unconstitutional.  Now, I agree that there's no reason our bills don't provide tactile information of their denominations, whether braille-like bumps, a variety of sizes or something else.

Then again, I also think American money is ugly by international standards.   (Check out these close-ups of the old Irish pound or punt, using ancient Irish manuscripts as the hard-to-counterfeit background design.)  Worse yet, the uniformity of American money's ugliness makes it easy even for the sighted to proffer the wrong bill by mistake - we've all done it, or received the wrong bill in exchange.  Abolishing the dollar bill and replacing it with a small, thick gold-colored coin like the English pound coin would be another excellent idea. 

The question is: how come I don't get to make these decisions?  Why can't I just make an announcement and order the American government to comply?  Is it merely that I'm not a federal judge?  Or is there some other concept at work? - what we might, for lack of a better term, call democracy.

The underlying assumption of Judge Robertson's decision is that the people of America have no say in the design of their currency.  Congress doesn't get a vote - on the implausible theory that it already voted, when it enacted the Rehabilitation Act outlawing discrimination against the vision-impaired.  What the people or their representatives actually want is neither here nor there.  Judges, because they are the Wise People, our Clan Elders, get to make decisions for all of us.  (See post 106 and post 125 and post 159.)

Variations of that underlying assumption can be found in every corner of the modern criminal justice system.  Indeed, Justice Stevens made it explicit earlier this week, when he wrote in a concurrence: "In my opinion, there is no merit whatsoever to the suggestion that the First Amendment may provide some measure of protection to spectators in a courtroom who engage in actual or symbolic speech to express any point of view about an ongoing proceeding."

In other words, victims of violent crime, and the survivors of victims, "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the [court]house gate."  By virtue of their status as non-lawyer weaklings, victims and their survivors are "so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect".

Stevens' point, of course, was that the work of the judges and lawyers is the only thing that matters.  Everything else - everything else in the world - is less important, by definition.  If your constitutional rights impinge on the autonomy of judges, then your constitutional rights evaporate.  That's the assumption behind his  entry in the competition for all-time most-fatuous Supreme Court decision, the one ordering the political persecution of the President through the judicial system to continue as long as right-wing billionaires were willing to finance it. 

Judge Robertson ruled that 300,000,000 Americans have no right to have any say in the design of their currency.  It might seem strange to phrase it that way, and probably Robertson himself used different words.  But the underlying idea isn't strange at all, at least not within the make-believe world of the courtroom, especially the criminal courtroom.  Our judiciary is dedicated to the proposition that deciding how much criminal violence is too much is entrusted to the Clan Elders.  Now, finish your snack and take a nice nap.

Robertson's ruling was purportedly based on a statute (though I doubt even he believes that), but the mindset it reveals is the mindset of the entire judicial project of the past half-century.  The mindset is: You don't count.  You're not a judge, you're not even a party to this case.  You have no rights that a judge is bound to respect.

The point of any constitutional ruling is to declare the topic of the ruling off-limits to the influence of majority rule.  Every constitutional decision puts another area of our public life outside the reach of democracy, and today virtually every area touching on the administration of criminal law is dictated by rulings that purport to be based on one or another Constitution.  The 300,000,000 don't have a say in the matter.  That's not a side-effect; it's the point.

There's a Forbidden City in the middle of our public square, an area into which commoners are not permitted to tread.  Stevens and his fellow judges have spent much of the last 50 years razing the surrounding neighborhoods to add new wings to it.  In this week's concurrence, Stevens was acknowledging the Forbidden City's existence and explaining exactly who are the commoners forbidden to set foot in it: everyone except judges and their servants, the lawyers. 

Comments

[Young PD]

I agree with the general tenor of your argument, and most of the examples that you give. I do think it is unfortunate that you seem to disagree with Justice Stevens' expressed opinion in the Carey case. In the other examples that you offer, the interest of the "public" is fairly clear. The continuation of the Jones case clearly disrupted the Clinton Presidency and this ruling about currency borders on ridiculous. However, notwithstanding your general position on supression of evidence and the rules of evidence keeping things from a jury, I find it hard to believe that you think that cheering sections for parties in trial should be allowed. In my opinion there is a big difference betweeen keeping something relevant from a jury because of its potential prejudicial effect and allowing family and friends of a victim who have been told by the cops and the prosecutor that this is the guy, to come in and cheer for the state.