June 29, 2010

Experiencing the Supreme Court

If I had been told two years ago that we would be seriously considering a candidate for the highest court in the nation who had little or no actual experience as a judge, I wouldn't have believed it. Like the presidency, there is no formal requirement for relevant experience, but it used to be expected as a matter of course. If, for example, either Pres. Bush had advanced as a nominee someone with so little experience, the media would gladly have trumpeted it as an example of that president's poor-decision making. In the current environment, however, the media simply mentions it as though it were another fact on a biography, not as an example of executive folly. This glaring bias is the sort of thing I've come to expect nowadays, but it's still very sad.

The Supreme Court nomination hearing is taking place during and soon after a Supreme Court case in which we learned, to our surprise, that clubs can't have control over who is and who is not a member. Soon, universities will be announcing that all clubs are in fact made up of all persons on campus, even visitors, so as to prevent any hint of discrimination. This all sounds very nice, very tolerant, but the eventual result of the real ruling will probably be to make club membership largely irrelevant.