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Llewellyn
King
Read Llewellyn's bio and previous columns
May 28, 2009
The Supremes Have It Made
Oh, to be a federal
judge – a lifetime judge. Ah, to interpret the 222-year-old U.S.
Constitution for lawmakers, or to have the unbridled joy of deciding
what Congress meant without being able to ask it.
It’s delightful to
be on the federal bench and divine to be on the Supreme Court, where you
can play mind games and search for writers’ clues hidden in the
Constitution. It’s the treasure hunt that never ends. More: You can look
at plain words – such as those in the Second Amendment – and, depending
on your personal interests, opine on what they mean with two radically
different interpretations.
You can also stir
things up by interpreting what your predecessors had already
interpreted. Stare decisis et non quieta mouvere (settled law)?
That’s just what they tell the kids in law school. The pranksters on the
highest court in the land will have none of it. Hence Roe v. Wade
hangs in the balance all the time. No stare decisis there.
Can anything be as
much fun as deciding what a group of, albeit exceptional and erudite, 18th-century
white men thought about the Internet? Talk about trivial pursuit. But it
is not trivial; it can reshape the country. As each term approaches,
fancy contemplating how much fun it would be to rearrange history by
persuading just four of your fellow justices.
But that's not all.
Working conditions are pretty nice, too. You can't be fired. The pay is
good. There is no mandatory retirement. All heavy lifting, from your
suitcase to a weighty opinion, can be delegated to those too-eager
clerks. The little buggers plan to make millions on the strength of
clerking for you. Make them work for it, whether it's picking up your
laundry or redefining the rights of the press.
But that's still not
all. As an added bonus, the evidence suggests you’ll live a long time.
After all, there's no strain. You are treated with unctuous deference.
Even if you are so gaga you can't tell one colleague from another, a
thousand law schools will hang on your ramblings. Clerks will write
opinions for you based on what they think you said. Deferential
colleagues will try to side with you, even if they think you're full of
it.
And don't forget the
sheer exhilaration of writing a minority opinion. You can really let off
steam in those. It's the next best thing to talk radio for venting and
it has a much greater impact. Just savor the shock on your colleagues’
faces when you turn against them and, quoting your smartest clerk, you
tell them what the Founders meant.
You've enjoyed the
reality television show Survivor. Well, that's what life on the
court can be like – with the additional pleasure that you can't be voted
off, canceled or bitten by a poisonous snake. On the other hand, the
chances for intragroup sex seem dim. Supreme Court justices opine on sex
more than . . . you fill the rest.
The greatest
pleasure of all, though, is to go against the constituency that endorsed
you. From Earl Warren to David Souter, this fun has been intense.
Appointing a justice is a crap shoot, like Henry II appointing Thomas
Becket to be Archbishop of Canterbury. High perfidy is possible.
In recent years,
things have been changing for the justices: More women and minorities
have joined the all-white-male rumpus room. This change to a
representative court brings up issues we should be informed about. Have
the Great Ones had to clean up their language, put down the seat on the
highest legal throne in the land, and does Clarence Thomas speak without
being spoken to? Does Antonin Scalia smirk in private as well as in
public, and does John Paul Stevens remember when he was born?
However democratic
we try to be, when presidents nominate someone for the highest court in
the land, they create a demigod, beyond the reach of politicians and
their jackals, journalists. They enter their own Pantheon, as sanctified
and superior as the gods of ancient Rome who were given, like the
Supreme Court, a marble temple, courtesy of the Emperor Hadrian.
© 2009 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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