why would think that these nine people best to judge, weigh policy judgments?
Chief Justice John Roberts of the United States Supreme Court asked this question from the bench in the case, Grants Pass v. Johnson, “Why would you think that these nine people are the best people to judge and weigh those policy judgments?”
I know I know I know … standing, procedure, precedent … Stare decisis … all that stuff, but boil it down.
Why would you think that these nine people are the best people to judge and weigh those policy judgments?
I am reminded of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. who said in a letter, “If my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It’s my job (Letter to Harold J. Laski, March 4, 1920).
While I think this current court embraces the first part of the quote quite well, If their fellow citizens want to go to Hell, they will help them.
It is that 2nd part of the sentence.
WHY?
Because, IT’S THEIR JOB!
The New York Times reports that the court will issue 61 decisions this session.
The NYT stated that in the 1980’s the court averaged 160 decisions a session.
What a staggering work load.
I can understand the need for luxury vacations with a pace like that.
But in a different sense, I agree with Justice Roberts.
I grew up in a different time where respect for some things, the Church, the Flag and the Supreme Court was not a question but just accepted.
Seemingly it has all gone away and fast.
Today?
Why would I think that these nine people are the best people to judge and weigh any judgments?
hope, a heartspun word … a tattered flag, the rainbow, and a dream of time
Hope is a tattered flag and a dream of time. Hope is a heartspun word, the rainbow, the shadblow in white The evening star inviolable over the coal mines, The shimmer of northern lights across a bitter winter night, The blue hills beyond the smoke of the steel works, The birds who go on singing to their mates in peace, war, peace, The ten-cent crocus bulb blooming in a used-car salesroom, The horseshoe over the door, the luckpiece in the pocket, The kiss and the comforting laugh and resolve— Hope is an echo, hope ties itself yonder, yonder. The spring grass showing itself where least expected, The rolling fluff of white clouds on a changeable sky, The broadcast of strings from Japan, bells from Moscow, Of the voice of the prime minister of Sweden carried Across the sea in behalf of a world family of nations And children singing chorals of the Christ child And Bach being broadcast from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania And tall skyscrapers practically empty of tenants And the hands of strong men groping for handholds And the Salvation Army singing God loves us …
From The People, Yes, by Carl Sandburg, 1936, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, for Flag Day, 2024.
In fond remembrance for a symbol I grew up with but now seems to have been moved beyond my reach.
I am reminded of this passage from the book, Glory Road by Bruce Catton.
Catton writing about the time just before the battle of Gettysburg.
Colonel Strong Vincent, leading a brigade in the V Corps, took his men through a little town, where the moonlight lay bright on the street, and in every doorway there were girls waving flags and cheering.
The battle flags were broken out of their casings and the men went through the town in step with music playing, and Gettysburg lay a few miles ahead.
Vincent reined in his horse and let the head of the column pass him, and as the colors went by he took off his hat, and he sat there quietly, watching the flags moving on in the silver light, the white dresses of the girls bright in the doorways, shimmering faint in the cloudy luminous dusk under the shade trees on the lawns.
To an aide who sat beside him the colonel mused aloud: There could be worse fates than to die fighting here in Pennsylvania, with that flag waving overhead.
This march took Col. Vincent and his brigade into battle on July 2nd, at place now known as Little Round Top.
Catton writes:
This was the brigade of Colonel Strong Vincent, who had sat in the moonlight a couple of nights earlier to reflect that a man could do worse than die on Pennsylvania soil under the old flag.
This was a day on which crisis followed crisis.
While they were hitting the 20th Maine the Confederates were also working around the right of Vincent’s line.
They made better progress here, and the right-flank regiment, 16th Michigan, was broken and driven back.
Vincent ran down into the melee to rally his men and the Rebels shot him dead, and once more the way was open for Confederate conquest of Little Round Top.
Under the old flag …
This was the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Division of the 5th Corps of the Army of the Potomac.
Mr. Catton was from the state of Michigan.
One of the regiments in this 3rd Brigade was the 16th Michigan made up of farm boy volunteers from Genesee County, Michigan.
One of those volunteers was my Great Great Grand Father.
He fought under the old flag as was wounded in action a year before Gettysburg and was out of the army by that time.
Under the old flag.
Flag Day, indeed.
I want my flag back.
According to Wikipedia, “The most distinctive and famous works of Hassam’s later life comprise the set of some thirty paintings known as the “Flag series”. He began these in 1916 when he was inspired by a “Preparedness Parade” (for the US involvement in World War I), which was held on Fifth Avenue in New York (renamed the “Avenue of the Allies” during the Liberty Loan Drives of 1918). Thousands participated in these parades, which often lasted for over twelve hours.”
do you remember when the only thing to fear was fear – fear itself?
First off, for today, do you remember, when the only thing to fear was fear itself?
Reminds me of Former President Obama when commented on this other fellers effort to find Mr. Obama’s birth certificate saying, “Remember when we thought that was as crazy as it could get?“
But I digress.
Two stories, thoughts behind this Thurber drawing.
One focuses on the thought behind this caption.
Do you remember, Crosby, when the only thing to fear was fear itself?
The caption and drawing appeared in the New Yorker Magazine on October 10, 1948.
Three weeks before election day, 1948 or Truman vs. Dewey.
The caption references the 1st of 4 inaugural addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt when President Roosevelt faced down the Great Depression .
FDR’s speech writer had paraphrased Henry David Thoreau who had written the sentence, “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear,” in his journal entry for September 7, 1851.
Now Mr. Dewey was painting a dark picture of the world with himself as the only way to fix it.
And poor Mr. Truman at the time with no one on his side.
On person wrote, “To err is Truman.”
Well sir, Truman won and the old joke was that FDR actually was elected five times.
Another joke is that when FDR died, a Republican laughed at the Democrat asking who would get to run now and the Democrat replies, oh we will dig up somebody and the Republican says, no no no, please don’t!
Such was the era when that caption was written.
The other story behind this drawing is that it is the second time the New Yorker ran the drawing.
It first appeared in the May 11, 1935 edition with the caption, “I never really rallied after the birth of my first child.”
By 1948, Thurber’s eye problems were getting worse and for the most part he was blind and couldn’t see to draw.
The editor of the New Yorker, Harold Ross, worried about Thurber’s finances and tried to come up with a way to reprint old Thurber drawings and pay him.
In his book on working with the editor, The Years with Ross, Thurber writes of this effort:
He began by taking my drawings as a joke, went through a phase in which he dismissed them as “a passing fancy, a fad of the English,” and ended up doing his darnedest, as my disability increased, to keep the drawings going by every kind of ingenious hook and crook. After I got so I could no longer see to draw, even with black grease crayon on large sheets of yellow paper, Ross began a campaign, recorded in a series of letters he wrote me, to reprint old drawings of mine with new captions. First he suggested reversing the old cuts, a simple mechanical maneuver; then, with the aid of others in the office who knew about such things, he experimented with taking figures or furniture out of one drawing and putting them in another, arriving at a dozen permutations of men, women, and dogs, chairs, bridge lamps, and framed pictures, upon which he must have spent hours of thought with his confederates in this conspiracy of consolation.
I did think up a few new captions for old drawings, but whatever device of recomposition was used, some readers got on to it.
In the last seven years of his life Ross wrote me dozens of letters and notes about my drawings. In one he said he had found out that the New Yorker had published three hundred and seven of my captioned drawings, of which one hundred and seventy-five had been printed in one or another of my books. He wanted to know if I would permit new captions by outsiders on those rearranged originals of mine. “There is a caption here on a sketch by an idea man,” he wrote me, “that it is thought might do for a re-used drawing of yours, as follows: (Two women talking) ‘Every time she tells a lie about me, I’m going to tell the truth about her.’ Now that I’ve got it on paper, it may not sound so hot, but it might do. The women in your drawings used to say some pretty batty things.” He wanted to pay me the full rate I had got for originals, but I said no on a project in which I would have no real creative part.
Fascinating in way.
Two captions.
One drawing.
Lots of stories.
Oh, and by the way, BOY HOWDY but do I you remember when the only thing to fear was fear itself? and “I never really rallied after the birth of my first child.”
twelve people go off in a room – different hearts minds, shapes, eyes and ears
Twelve people go off into a room.
Twelve different hearts, twelve different minds, from twelve different walks of life — twelve sets of eyes and ears, shapes and sizes.
And these twelve people have to judge another human being as different from them as they are from each other — and in their judgment they must become of one mind — unanimous.
It’s one of the miracles of man’s disorganized soul that they can do it — and most of the time do it right well.
God bless juries.
From the movie Anatomy of a Murder screenplay by Wendell Mayes From the novel by Robert Traver.
The book is based on a case from the Upper Pennisula of Michigan.
The author, a Judge from the UP writes in the forward that, “I longed to try my hand at telling about a criminal trial the way it really was, and, after my years of immersion, I felt equally strongly that a great part of the tension and drama of any major felony trial lay in its very understatement, its pent and almost stifled quality, not in the usually portrayed shoutings and stompings and assorted finger-waggings that almost inevitably accompanied the sudden appearance and subsequent grilling of that monotonously dependable last-minute witness. …“
It is one of the co-stars, Arthur O’Connell, as Parnell McCarthy who sits back and delivers this quiet speech on juries.
their disillusion was deep and they had to fall farther to reach it
Based on :
Those fanciful old ideas about the glory of a waving flag, the shame of running from danger, the high importance of dying with one’s face to the foe — since that war they have come to seem as out of date as the muzzle-loaders that were used for weapons in those days.
The American soldier of later, more sophisticated eras may indeed die rather than retreat, and do it as courageously as any, but he never makes a song about it or strikes an attitude.
His heroism is without heroics, and fine phrases excite his instant contempt, because he knows even before he starts off to war that fine phrases and noble attitudes and flags waving in death’s own breeze are only so many forms of a come-on for the innocent; nor does he readily glimpse himself as a knight of the ancient chivalry.
But in the 1860s the gloss had not been worn off.
Young men then went to war believing all of the fine stories they had grown up with; and if, in the end, their disillusion was quite as deep and profound as that of the modern soldier, they had to fall farther to reach it.
From Mr. Lincoln’s Army by Bruce Catton, Doubleday & Co, Garden City, NY, 1951
It would be another two years before Mr. Lincoln said:
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us,
that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion,
that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain,
that this nation,
under God,
shall have a new birth of freedom,
and that government of the people, by the people,
for the people,
shall not perish from the earth.
And what kind of nation was Mr. Lincoln talking about?
A new nation,
conceived in liberty,
and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
On this Memorial Day, 2024 I close with this thought from Mr. Lincoln’s 1st Inaugeral Address, March 4, 1861.
The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave let us know that we didn’t get this far on our own.
We are standing on the shoulders of a lot of other folks.
To slip now …
Time to depend on those better angels of our nature.
No Haiku For You 