There are now three ways to learn to distrust the law. Either haplessly involve yourself in some minor legal proceeding -- as a forever sorry few of us have -- which instantly reveals the law's and its practicing lawyers' abject disregard for justice sought, found, and executed; or read Charles Dickens -- as many of us have -- who recognized in the practice of law society's greatest impediment to social honor, integrity, and progress; or track today's U.S. Supreme Court -- as most of us have -- in its thoughtless actions.
It may be that the Post's Steven Perlstein at some time engaged in Method A, though he doesn't say; however this morning he does plunder the vast wisdom of Methods B and C:
If the law is an ass, as Mr. Bumble declares in "Oliver Twist," then constitutional law must surely be the entire wagon train....
[The Obamacare case] was to be a "teaching moment" for the country, an opportunity to see the best and the brightest engage in a reasoned debate on the limits of federal power. Instead, what we got too often was political posturing, Jesuitical hair-splitting and absurd hypotheticals.
For an even more jaundiced view and thus deeper understanding of SCOTUS I would add, from Dickens' Bleak House, his description of England's High Court of Chancery as one that labored in "tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities" and "making a pretence of equity with serious faces" -- not so foreign or historical, no? I would add as well the final cynicism that there's little to no reason to anticipate, as Perlstein does, that our High Court "is likely to articulate a modest new limit on Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce that would allow health reform to proceed in some fashion" or "duck the commerce clause altogether and simply uphold the individual mandate as a legitimate exercise of Congress’s taxing power."
Were it not for Bush v. Gore, there'd be virtually no reason to suspect an always political Supreme Court as, further, a Court ideologically corrupted beyond hope. But suffer we did the cutting indignity of that tragic decision, which only emboldened the Court to proceed from tragedy to farce, in Citizens United. Now it is axiomatic that past behavior is the best predictor of future performance, ergo, one's best guess must be that in the pending case the Court will proceed from tragedy and farce to final insult.
How then will the nation proceed when its last institutional outpost of (once) presumed impartiality renders itself -- again -- but a brazenly open kangaroo Court of banana-republic decadence? I haven't a clue. So for now I'll seek refuge in what is likely Mr. Perlstein's profoundly delusional world, which is able to house a Supreme Court of some dignity.
It reminds one (well, me, anyway) of the last days of the Roman Republic, when the august Senate was merely a shadow play of governance, while the real power lurked elsewhere among the few, the proud, the guys with armies.
Posted by: Janicket | April 02, 2012 at 10:23 AM