Lying To Make Friends

I could not support more strongly the idea that we need as much diversity as possible on the Supreme Court, and not just along the race/gender/religion/sexual orientation axes that we normally talk about.  I understand that it’s difficult to get a cross-section of America on a nine-member body, but any time the president has an opportunity to add a new perspective or unrepresented voice to the Court, she should seek to do so.  Most of my least favorite cases in law school were those in which the judges or justices seemingly had no concept of how the effects of their decisions would be experienced by the litigants.  Reading Dahlia Lithwick’s account of oral argument in a case involving the strip search of 13 year-old Savana Redding one shudders to think how that case would have turned out had Ruth Bader Ginsburg not been around to set her male colleagues straight.  (Despite Lithwick’s pessimism after oral argument, the Court ultimately (kinda sorta) reached the right decision.)

And so I’m sympathetic to arguments against Elena Kagan’s nomination on grounds that the Court is already too urban, too Northeastern, and too Ivy League.  But this column by Kathleen Parker is the absolute worst way to make that argument.  The problem with urban/coastal/Harvard/Yale types is that they’re already overrepresented on the Court, not that they’re somehow less “ordinary American” or “mainstream” than anyone else.  This is one of the most pernicious beliefs driving the conservative movement today, that to be white, rural, and Christian is to be more American than those who are not.  When Bill O’Reilly speaks for and to “the folks,” he’s not addressing the members of Kagan’s synagogue.

This is especially true of the Tea Party movement, and its “we want our country back” rhetoric.  Aside from preposterous theories about his citizenship, claims against the legitimacy of the Obama presidency are driven by the belief that, although Obama won clear majorities of the popular and electoral votes, “real Americans” voted for McCain.  Paul Waldman effectively destroys such claims, pointing out that a majority of the country is urban and reminding us that people in places thought of as quintessentially American, like Nebraska, are as far to the right of the political center as people in New York are to the left.

No single place or person could effectively stand in for America; there is no “mainstream.”  New York is no more and no less American that Mayberry.  But while the urban centers of the Northeast and West Coast are no less American than the small towns of the prairies, they are not all of America, and we should worry if they end up being the only areas represented on a body as powerful as the Supreme Court.

-AR