Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Two thoughts on the Supreme Count nomination

The other night I heard "an expert" on TV whose name I didn't catch say:

I think all those people talking about the short list and who's on it don't really know much, and the few people who do know about the list aren't talking.

That sounds about right. Let's nominate him for the short list of "Experts Worth Listening To"

The Democrats keep saying they want the new justice to be just like Justice O'Conner. The President, they claim, has "a responsibility" to appoint someone who will rule on cases as she has and presumably would continue to rule had she stayed on the court.

Well, what if we were already doing what the Democrats are asking, replacing one justice with another likely to be very similar when making decisions? And suppose we had been doing that for more then a 100 years; and, sure enough, one justice was a lot like the justice he or she replaced.

Wouldn't that mean that with the court deciding 8-1 in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case to uphold the doctrine of “separate but equal,” that we would still have segregation today, with the court upholding it by an 8-1 vote?

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

And don't forget that Brown would never have been voted.

As to the wisdom of doing that sort of equalization through the courts rather than the legislature, I leave it aside.