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Tuesday, September 13, 2005

The return of Mr. Answer Man

Dear Mr. Answer Man:  While you’ve been spending all your time playing the blame game with natural disasters, the Senate has moved on to the confirmation hearing of John Roberts.  Do you think Roberts will be confirmed as Chief Justice, and if so, to what effect?  And what will become of Rehnquist’s extra special quadruple-striped robes?  Can I have them if Roberts isn’t planning on using them?  I think they look boss. —R. Bork, Gomorrah

Mister Answer Man replies:  Mr. Bork (if that is indeed your real name), surely you are aware that Article II, section 2, clause 2 of the Constitution of the United States provides that the President “shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States,” and that under Article III, section 1, clause 1, “the judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, the Chief Justice of which shall wear a robe bearing four stripes.  Four shall be the number of the stripes on the Chief Justice’s robes, and the number of the stripage shall be four.  Three stripes shall there not be, and five is right out.” Please consult your copy of the Constitution before wearying Mister Answer Man with such questions.

As for whether Roberts will be confirmed, and to what effect, Mister Answer Man defers to Greil Marcus, who ably answered this question and many others way back in November 2004:

Adding to Mr. Bush’s statutory and administrative economic policies were a series of decisions by the “Bush Court,” as the Supreme Court was known after 2005, when in that year Mr. Bush replaced three retiring members with very conservative justices (a fourth was replaced in 2006), depriving government regulation of corporations and the environment of any legal basis—decisions which many analysts considered more significant than the repudiation by the Bush Court of previous decisions upholding a woman’s right to privacy in the matter of abortion and certain applications of affirmative action. Even with the Bush Court seated, however, the Republican-controlled Congress that Mr. Bush enjoyed throughout his presidency repeatedly passed legislation removing issue after issue from the purview of the state and federal courts, including questions of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to assemble, and the right to trial by jury. Despite these prohibitions of judicial review, the government, under Mr. Bush, did not press for any legislation curtailing what had previously been referred to as “First Amendment freedoms,” but simply refrained from challenging such legislation passed by many states, rather filing supportive briefs before the Supreme Court when such measures were contested. Ultimately the reversal of the series of 20th-century Supreme Court decisions subjecting the states to the Bill of Rights, long-sought by certain conservatives, was achieved not de jure but de facto. “The press is legally free,” the former New York Times columnist Frank Rich put it in 2007, writing in his online journal Thatsrichbrother.com. “It merely refrains from practicing freedom.” Some said the same of the nation as a whole; others said the country was freer than it had ever been.

Mister Answer Man thinks that Marcus’s essay is holding up pretty well so far.  Read the whole thing if you want to find out what happens in the One-Day War.

Posted by Michael on 09/13 at 12:09 PM
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