Me the People: One Man's Selfless Quest to Rewrite the Constitution of the United States of America by Kevin Bleyer

Author:Kevin Bleyer
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Topic, Humor, Political, General, United States, Political Science, History
ISBN: 9780679604129
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

TILL DEATH DO US EX PARTE

I DON’T BOTHER LECTURING Justice Scalia on any of this; after decades of legal study and twenty-five years of service as one of America’s Top Judges, he’s been fully briefed.

Instead, I begin my cross-examination.

“How about you?” I ask.

“How about me what?” he counters.

“Can you imagine just walking away?” I ask.

“Of course I can,” he scoffs, with a couldn’t-care-less tone that implies he’d just as soon leave today if only he hadn’t signed a two-year lease on his Supreme Court locker.

“When?” I ask.

“Like I’ve said before, as soon as I’m not firing on all eight cylinders, when I’m not doing the job as well as I used to, it’ll be time to go.”

“How will you know when that is?”

He looks me straight in the eye.

“I’ll know.”

You’re treading on thin ice, counselor.

“So you don’t need some outside authority limiting the term of your serv—”

“I’m fairly aware of the requirements of the position,” he says. “I’ll know when I can no longer fulfill them.”

Thin ice.

And yet:

“What if I told you, Your Honor, that someone even more powerful than you says you’re wrong about that.”

Very thin ice.

“And who is that?”

“Someone you know quite well.”

He looks at me, wondering if he should ask.

“Who?”

If this were a case in some courtroom drama, this is the moment when I would stand slowly, scan the jury, look back at the judge, and call on my surprise witness:

May it please the court, I now call to the stand … [dramatic pause] … the current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

If this were indeed a courtroom drama, the double doors in the back of the courtroom would fly open, the stenographer would record the reaction of the gallery—

[Audible gasps]

—and Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Junior, would saunter up the aisle, hesitating only long enough to lock eyes with fellow justice Scalia and feel his glare: Et tu, Roberte?

Roberts would then explain to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury that no matter what he says, or how he pleads for mercy, Justice Antonin Scalia should have been kicked off the Court exactly ten years ago.

Back in real life, I explain what the hell I’m talking about. When he was a lawyer in the Reagan White House, twenty-two years before he joined the Supremes, John Roberts argued on behalf of a fifteen-year term limit for Supreme Court justices. It was a both a pragmatic proposal—as he saw it, the Founders “adopted life tenure at a time when people simply did not live as long as they do now”—and a principled one, for many of the same reasons I’ve trotted out: “A judge insulated from the normal currents of life for twenty-five or thirty years was a rarity then but is becoming commonplace today,” he wrote, in a White House memo. “Setting a term of, say, fifteen years would ensure that federal judges would not lose all touch with reality through decades of ivory tower existence.” It is an indictment of lifetime tenure too compelling to ignore.

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