I confess I don’t quite follow that.
They pretty much all went to Harvard or Yale.
(Coincidentally, I was in Kavanaugh’s undergraduate class. I didn’t know him at all, though. The name wasn’t even familiar)
I think his point is that how is their all going to Yale or Harvard more important than their actual political leaning?
I think the question was “Why does it matter that they all learned law at the same two schools? Don’t you learn the same law pretty much everywhere you go? Why would it be more diverse if some of them went to Northwestern or Stanford Law?”
(Scuzz beat me to it)
It means they came out of the same academic culture, and there is significant overlap in their shared experiences.
Yes but I don’t follow how that is more important than their political leanings.
Maybe more important than H vs Y, is that they have all been prosecutors – none of them have been defense attorneys. Why don’t we look for that kind of experience diversity on the SC as well I wonder.
I don’t know if it’s more or less important. But this is a huge and very diverse country. Judges are not meant to represent everyone in the way that Congress does, but that is a tiny (and very distinct) slice of our culture, and that slice makes decisions for everyone.
Someone like Kavanaugh has been in a bubble his whole life, from prep school through now. Has he ever had a conversation with a working-class person, other than ordering dinner or picking up his dry cleaning?
Really there are 200+ law schools in the country, every Supreme Court went to just 2. Basically we’ve just eliminate 99% of all lawyers in this country from being Supreme Court justice on the basis of what their LSAT scores, and getting a GPA under 3.8 as undergrad. It doesn’t matter what they did afterword, (RBG had an amazing career as I learned from the movie) but most didn’t.
Despite all the media hype the Supreme court isn’t that partisan institution. They decide the law based on how they were taught at Harvard and Yale. I find it troubling that there is so little diversity in the background of SCOTUS justices.
This. Also they never have any sort of background related to not being prosecutors, which means they trend heavily towards screwing over defendants and giving the police a pass on transgressions.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/whitehouse-rails-again-robert-5-scotus-majority
“No wonder the American people feel the game is rigged,” Whitehouse said. He pointed to the Trump administration’s use of the Federalist Society to pick judicial nominees and the ad campaigns to confirm those nominees led by the Judicial Crisis Network, whose funders remain secret.
Whitehouse also brought up Roberts’ famous confirmation hearing line — that as a judge he merely calls balls and strikes — to argue that his court is 73-0 in ruling in favor of corporations.
“Big Republican interests keep winning 5-4 partisan decisions: 73-0, Mr. Kavanaugh, every damned time,” Whitehouse said.
Uh, if you think the SC isn’t partisan, all I have to say to you is “Bush v Gore”. In which Scalia explains that counting the votes might de-legitimize the rightful Republican President:
The counting of votes that are of questionable legality does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner Bush, and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election.
RBG, wasn’t a prosecutor, but you make a good point.
To pretend their huge difference between Justice Roberts, Sotomayor, Gorsuch, and nominee Garland or Kavanaugh, based on trying to discern politics from their writing is sort of silly.
Basically, we have filled the Supreme Court with Paladins with 18 in Intelligence and Wisdom. Sure they had different life experience for 1 to 18. But pretty much from age 18 to 50, you could swap any of their life experience backgrounds with the others and nobody could tell. All of these folks followed societies rules, both written and unwritten to a T. They vigorously enforced the laws on those folks who weren’t blessed with either high intelligence or wisdom.
Now we could do worse than have a Supreme court with high intelligence Paladin, and it does appear that most of them have developed some compassion. But lets get real, it is pretty pointless to find a reason to not confirm a Paladin. We’ve gotten in our-self in a catch 22. If you don’t nominate somebody with a perfect record they won’t get confirmed.
Frankly, I’d love to have one Saul Goodman on the court, but that will never happen.
There have been ~1200 SCOTUS cases since Bush V Gore, I think you’d be hard pressed to find more than a few dozen that are highly partisan. The other 96-97% are what I"m talking about. But don’t believe me go read any of the books on the Supreme Court, and after you finish come back and tell me why I’m wrong.
Historically you are correct.
The NYT did had a piece a few years ago showing this is no longer the case - I posted a link some months ago but can’t find it now. Here’s one academic paper that covers it.
Split Definitive: How Party Polarization Turned the Supreme Court into a Partisan Court
Abstract.
Starting in 2010 the Supreme Court has divided into two partisan ideological blocs; all the Court’s Democratic appointees are liberal and all its Republicans are conservative. Correspondingly, since 1990 there has been a dramatic increase in the ideological gap between Democratic and Republican appointees. In this article we make use of original empirical research to establish that this partisan division is unprecedented in the Court’s history, and we undertake a systematic analysis of how it came about. We show that it is linked to growing partisan polarization among political elites, polarization that has shaped the Court in multiple ways. Presidents — for the first time ever — make ideology the dominant factor in appointing Justices. The Senate confirmation process too pays increasing attention to ideology, including party line votes that block the consideration of judicial nominees. Equally significant, the sorting of elites into the two parties on the basis of ideology has greatly reduced the numbers of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans who might be selected as Justices.
Finally, political elites that tended to lean in a moderate-to-liberal direction during the 1960s through 1980s have become polarized along ideological lines. As we show through original research on the voting patterns of Justices, Justices who once might have been drawn toward moderation are increasingly reinforced in their liberal or conservative orientations. One key reason is that the rise of the conservative legal network has worked against the “drift” of Republican appointees toward more liberal positions that was common a few decades ago. This analysis indicates that the current partisan division on the Court is not a temporary phenomenon; rather, it is likely to continue as long as the current partisan polarization continues.
Just to follow up on this, it looks like Feinstein handed the letter to the FBI because the FBI does the vetting. The FBI then handed it to the White House. If there’s anything criminal the FBI is obliged to investigate, but whether they do or not we won’t know (highly unlikely I think.)
I read/skimmed the paper when you posted it a while ago and reviewed again. As matter of perception, I grew up hearing how political the Warren court was. Through 1950, then found that only .5% of the cases were partisan, I’m guessing that view point is partly because what seem super political today feels historic 60 years later.
I found there methodology compelling, hopefully, they didn’t screw up in the analysis. So I won’t disagree with their conclusion that court is more partisan now than in the past.
But as the paper took pains to point out.
Finally, and perhaps most important, Justices decide cases in legal
terms. As a result, ideological considerations often do not figure into
the Court’s decision making.20 Then-Senator Barack Obama underlined
this reality when he voted against confirmation of Chief
Justice John Roberts not because of the “95 percent of the cases” that would be decided as a matter of law but because of the “5 percent of cases that are truly difficult.”2
So yes we’ve gone from .5% partisan cases to 2-3% by the end of 1990s to say 5%, but that still leaves 95% that aren’t. The paper talks a lot about how dominant elite value on the court and how that affects the opinions. All talk more about that later, but I really think it’s every bit as important is the partisanship.
I really like.this op-ed by Patrick Leahy: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/brett-kavanaugh-misled-the-senate-under-oath-i-cannot-support-his-nomination/2018/09/13/ea75c740-b77d-11e8-b79f-f6e31e555258_story.html?utm_term=.b31737b1068d
That’s great, but Republicans don’t fucking care.