Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - Posts
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The accounts in recent days of the Vice President and several agency heads and other high government officials (Ashcroft, Rice, Powell, Tenet, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, et al.), convening meeting after meeting at which they carefully and dispassionately reached a consensus that the United States should establish a systematized, bureaucratic regime of officially sanctioned waterboarding and other plainly proscribed war crimes have struck me as old news -- not terribly surprising: After all, last year the President himself publicly boasted of having personally authorized the CIA black sites program and its "enhanced interrogation techniques," which we know to have included waterboarding, hypothermia, stress positions, severe sleep and sensory deprivation, threats to detainees and their families, etc. -- all conduct that is prohibited by several legal norms and that this nation has traditionally prosecuted as war crimes when engaged in by others. If the President authorized it, well then it should come as no shock that there would first have been principals meetings at which this all-important program was discussed and recommended.
What is alarming -- grotesque, even -- is not that such meetings occurred, but that, as far as we know, no one at such meetings interrupted the flow of discussion to point out the obvious --
-- continue reading at Balkinization.
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. . . would almost certainly have to be this one.
And the problem is so gargantuan, so intractable, that despair seems to be the only possible response -- particularly if, like me, you've recently finished watching the gut-wrenching Season Three of The Wire on DVD.
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Anyone happen to catch ABC’s Boston Legal last night? I’ve never watched the show, but somehow found myself gaping through an episode in which James Spader argues what turned out to be last week’s Louisiana capital rape case before an astoundingly good simulation of the current high court. They found actors who looked enough like the justices to be credible, Spader pretty much argued the brief in Kennedy, and the writers allowed an entire 15 minute segment just for his oral argument. I can’t recall another time I’ve seen anything as close to the real justices represented on prime time television, or a moment in which someone in the popular culture – outside an op/ed -- really took on the Roberts Court as a collection of political actors rather than an abstract blur of black robe.
To be sure, David E. Kelly’s brief against the Roberts Court (too pro-death, too pro-business, too pro-Bush . . .) was more than a little overheated. The four conservative justices looked a little too smug and jowly. When Spader segued from arguing capital rape, to Bush v Gore and then the Exxon case I nearly threw a shoe at him. And when he cowed the conservatives into silence by reminding them of the court’s role as the nation’s “conscience” and its duty to the ideal of "mercy" I actually laughed out loud. Still, I am guessing ABC’s viewers learned more about the Supreme Court – how it looks and feels inside, how argument happens, how the various Justices behave, and how ideology is at least part of what they do – than they would have done in anything short of an actual visit to the court. And I can’t help but think that if more television and movies actually dealt with the court -- even a fictionalized one -- the public would better understand why the court matters and why elections matter.
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