[tom oliphant is almost always too conservative for me. he even sometimes
wears a bow tie like that imbecile tucker carlson. unlike carlson,
oliphant is smart and often raises issues that cause me to reevaluate my
positions. perhaps this article will cause the same reevaluation for some
of you. jgk]
Roberts lacks knowledge of justice
By THOMAS OLIPHANT
First published: Thursday, September 15, 2005
WASHINGTON -- John Roberts is poised to win confirmation as the next
chief justice of the United States because, among other things, he knows
the law cold. But after one of the most near-perfect, resume-punching
voyages ever to the Supreme Court, there is almost no evidence of his
understanding of justice.
This has nothing to do with the overwhelming odds of his confirmation by
the Senate. It does, however, have something to do with how his possibly
routine elevation should be received.
To illustrate, I have no doubt that his encyclopedic knowledge of
constitutional history includes a detailed understanding of Plessy vs.
Ferguson, the landmark abomination that enshrined segregation in 1896 for
another 58 years under the delusional mantra of "separate but equal." It
wouldn't surprise me if Judge Roberts could quote sentences from Justice
Henry Brown's majority opinion on behalf of eight brethren and even from
John Harlan's passionate dissent.
But I doubt very much that Roberts knows beans about Homer Plessy, and I
can imagine him being tripped up even if asked Plessy's first name. It is
that human face of justice, or injustice, that concerns me, and, from the
available record anyway, has never interested Roberts.
Plessy was a New Orleans Creole, born in the middle of the Civil War and
an activist by the time he agreed in 1892 to test Louisiana's law
requiring segregation aboard trains. He was arrested for refusing to
leave the "white" car (shades of Rosa Parks 63 years later), jailed, and
held on a bond of $500, very stiff for those days. It mattered not a whit
to the racist authorities that his heritage included but one great-
grandmother of African descent; that's all it took to subject him to
racial discrimination.
Plessy made the ridiculous, for that period, contention that the 13th
Amendment made him free and the 14th gave him the same rights as anyone
else, which no state could abridge. After losing that argument four years
later, he lived out his days in New Orleans; he was a shoemaker by trade.
Plessy died in 1925.
Around here, it is chic to consider Roberts' confirmation doubly likely
because he is set to replace William Rehnquist instead of the less
predictably conservative Sandra Day O'Connor. Rehnquist's recent death
removed the last figure from the court who had a link to the shameful
civil rights days. As a Roberts-like genius fresh out of law school,
Rehnquist wrote a personal memo to the justice for whom he clerked,
Robert H. Jackson, arguing that the Plessy doctrine should be upheld in
the set of school segregation cases before the Supreme Court in 1953.
Fortunately, neither Jackson nor a unanimous court agreed with
Rehnquist's segregation advocacy in the decisions grouped under the title
of Brown v. Board of Education. But it came back to bite him when he was
considered for associate justice in 1971 and then chief 15 years later.
The credibility of his wiggling answers that got him off the hook is
still heatedly debated.
Perhaps it is a measure of how things have changed that while it is
generally considered intrusive to ask a Supreme Court appointee how he
might rule on actual or hypothetical cases, there are exceptions, and
fealty to the Brown decision has been one of them for years.
Roberts will have no trouble passing the litmus test. But his passing of
it will mask the long record of his fealty to the true purpose of
conservatism in civil rights for well over a generation -- the blocking
of remedies to achieve broad desegregation and promote genuine
integration and equal opportunity. His paper trail shows consistent
fealty to the sideshows over affirmative action, "quotas," and other
manifestations of the effort to restrict civil rights gains as threats to
white people.
In an interesting poll last week, the Pew Center found only 18 percent of
the public is paying very close attention to the Roberts ascendancy, as
opposed to more than 70 percent who were very closely following Hurricane
Katrina and its embarrassing aftermath.
In truth, the two stories should be linked. The hurricane and the
different treatment accorded different victims of it exposed more than
weak levees and degraded wetlands. It also exposed the institutional
factors that make one-fourth of New Orleans officially poor as well as
nearly 40 million other Americans -- some of them based in economic
injustice, but some of them clearly racial, as anyone with a TV set could
see this month.
Roberts' record is that of a defender of these arrangements, which will
put him in the mainstream of Supreme Court actions going back a
generation. My guess is that the more Americans know about this era on
the court, the less they will like it -- hence, for example, the effort
to close off the records of Roberts' Justice Department tenure under
President Bush I.
Barring a documentary bombshell, Roberts' confirmation should be the
occasion of a sad shrug. Homer Plessy met his equivalent more than a
century ago.
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=398978
&category=OPINION&newsdate=9/15/2005
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