"Unlike many evangelists, Rev. Robertson came from a privileged background. He grew up in the corridors of power in Virginia and Washington and graduated from Yale Law School..."

"... before turning to the ministry in the late 1950s. 'Robertson’s critics often depict the evangelist-broadcaster as a political extremist with bizarre beliefs,' novelist and journalist Garrett Epps wrote in The Post in 1986. 'But it may make more sense to view him as the last old-school southern politician.'"

From "Pat Robertson, televangelist who mixed politics and religion, dies at 93" (WaPo).

"Donald Trump Promised He Wouldn’t Nominate a Black Woman to the Supreme Court."

Claims Garrett Epps at Washington Monthly.

I can already hear snuffling noises off to my right protesting that he did no such thing, that Trump actually, as he said at the time, named highly qualified federal judges “representative of the kind of constitutional principles I value.” 

Yet it is a fact that the two lists his campaign developed with the counsel of conservative activists (which he had promised not to stray from in filling the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Court) contained not a single Black woman. Trump said nothing about excluding Black female judges. He just did it....

Yes, and Biden would be in a very different position if he'd said nothing about choosing a black woman and had just done it. That's the traditional way of adding diversity to the Court. You say you're picking the very best person for the job and the person you chose is accorded the dignity of being called the best person and not merely the best within a constricted pool. 

But it is true that by offering the list the way he did, Trump assured anyone who cared that he would not nominate a black woman.

Garrett Epps determines that Clarence Thomas is "not a judge at all."

"Thomas on the bench simply does not conform to expected judicial norms. He does not take part in the arguments before the Court. His decisions rest on unusual grounds, often not even mentioned in the briefs; he will not even air his idiosyncratic ideas at a time when others might engage them. He does not tend to limit himself to the issue presented or the factual context within which it is embedded. He is, in other words, not a judge at all."

Link (to The Atlantic).

"The Supreme Court Case That Could Clobber Public-Sector Unions."

Garrett Epps looks at yesterday's oral argument.

[The National Right to Work Committee argues] that permitting the [public-sector] unions to collect fees for representing non-members—the so-called “agency fee”—violates the First Amendment....

Since public employees work for government, everything they bargain about is political. Higher wages, better benefits, new work rules—all affect the state budget. Assessing fees from non-members thus requires them to pay for political speech.

All the expenses, in other words, are non-chargeable.

Scalia appeared skeptical of that argument, but it went over with three of the other four conservatives.

So liberal hopes hang on Scalia of all people. Epps extracts some quotes.

What do you think of Garrett Epps saying Justice Alito "looked for all the world like Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High..."

"... signaling to the homies his contempt for Ray Walston as the bothersome history teacher, Mr. Hand"? Commenters at "Did Justice Alito roll his eyes while Justice Ginsburg was speaking?" let Epps have it. Does he even know the movie? Amartel said:

If Alito had ordered a pizza to be delivered to the well at the Supreme Court, or called Ginsburg a "dick" that would be, like, a totally different story.

Likewise, Youngblood says:

Spicoli doesn't act like that in the film. Now, if Justice Alito said to Justice Ginsburg, "You DICK!" or ordered a pizza in the middle of class, that would be a different story. But little niggling gestures of disrespect aren't really Spicoli-like at all.

And CatherineM:

What I find most offensive is the Spicoli reference. Has Epps ever watched Fast Times? Jeff called Hand a dick once for ripping up his excuse, but he never mocked Mr. Hand. He was incapable. He was too high.

That's his tell. Epps is lying. I object.

To sum up, here's Henry:

Jeff Spicoli is a hero. When did liberals go all in on being turgid squares?

I don't know, man, but the Supreme Court is about to close up for the summer, and maybe all Sam Alito needs are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and he'll be fine.  When it's October, and the Justices are back for oral arguments, maybe he will order that pizza....

Did Justice Alito roll his eyes while Justice Ginsburg was speaking?

Garrett Epps and Dana Milbank think so.

Milbank says "Alito visibly mocked his colleague":

Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the high court, was making her argument about how the majority opinion made it easier for sexual harassment to occur in the workplace when Alito, seated immediately to Ginsburg’s left, shook his head from side to side in disagreement, rolled his eyes and looked at the ceiling.

Epps:

... Alito pursed his lips, rolled his eyes to the ceiling, and shook his head "no." He looked for all the world like Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, signaling to the homies his contempt for Ray Walston as the bothersome history teacher, Mr. Hand. 

I don't trust the descriptions of Epps and Milbank. Maybe we could get some more discussion of the meaning of Alito's head — from some observers who like him. And then I could calculate the truth from there. But what would be better would be  cameras in the Supreme Court chambers. This is a new argument for cameras in the Supreme Court — to protect Samuel Alito from calumny.

Amusingly, Epps begins his little article with:

I suspect that the cause of cameras in the Supreme Court suffered a blow on Monday. I am glad the nation did not see first-hand Justice Samuel Alito's display of rudeness to his senior colleague, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Because Alito's mini-tantrum was silent, it will not be recorded in transcript or audio; but it was clear to all with eyes, and brought gasps from more than one person in the audience.

It wasn't clear to me, and I have eyes.

Nice of Epps to want to protect me and the rest of Americans who didn't make it into the courtroom that day, but I prefer to be free to look things and form my own opinion, not to get second-hand descriptions from partisans and polemicists.

And by the way, the notion that female Justices command stronger displays of decorum than male Justices is sexist. Show some real respect.

AND: Do I detect anti-Italian prejudice? Alito is too visibly expressive. He's like a movie character with an Italian name (Spicoli)? The rule is your face should be a mask? WASP-style?

ALSO: Remember the words of one of the world's greatest Italian-Americans:



MOREOVER: Want to bet that if emotions played across the visage of Sonia Sotomayor while Alito or Scalia were articulating some nugget of conservatism that media's Epps and Milbanks would tell us that this — this! — was the empathy Obama said was essential to judging?

AND: A new post highlighting comments about what's wrong with likening Alito to Spicoli.

"The First Amendment doesn't belong to courts. Either it lives inside all of us or it dies."

"Is our culture so degraded that educated civil servants don't know enough about free speech to slap an idea like this down at its inception?"

Writes Garrett Epps at the conclusion of his piece titled "Why Is It So Hard to Keep the IRS Out of Politics? Government officials need a refresher course in the First Amendment 'anti-retaliation' principle."

Instapundit linked, saying: "Two observations: (1) Obama was joking about auditing his enemies in 2009; and (2) Go to a flat tax or a national sales tax and this problem largely disappears."

On point #1, Instapundit doesn't mean Obama was only joking (and therefore he shouldn't be taken seriously or thought to be connected to the actual targeting of enemies). Instapundit means that Obama thought so little of the important principle at stake that a joke could be made of it.

On point #2: Yes! As I said when this story first broke (responding to Ezra Klein who'd argued that what we need most is harsher — but equal — enforcement of tax law):

The unequal, politically skewed enforcement of a law is a far more serious problem than the level of harshness of a neutrally enforced law. We can disagree about what the tax laws should be and how strictly or harshly they should be enforced, but everyone knows it is fundamentally wrong to vary the degree of enforcement, selecting victims by their politics. If government cannot be trusted to avoid that fundamental wrong, it cannot be trusted with any power at all. It would be better to wipe the tax code clean and rebuild it without any complicated corners where government officials — great or small — have a place to do their dirty work.

Let's do it! Let's set things up so we are not dependent on the good faith of government officials. Flat tax or national sales tax.

ADDED: Rereading this, I see that I need to distance myself from Epps. Even though I agree we need broad and deep cultural understanding of freedom of speech and that the courts alone cannot preserve it, I don't accept that freedom of speech will die unless "all of us" keep the faith. We have a legal system with constitutional rights because of the danger that the political majority will — in some times and in some circumstances — lose track of these values.

And quite aside from what the people in general think, the individuals who get their hands on power will always be tempted to put their immediate desires ahead of other concerns. No "refresher course" on the First Amendment will overcome that tendency. We need to use law to confine them. Of course, Epps is right that First Amendment law, enforced by courts isn't going to control them enough, but inculcated First Amendment principles are not enough either.

We should do what we can to redesign the structures of power so the inevitable degradation of commitment to freedom will not have such a damaging effect. When it comes to taxes, we do have an obvious legal solution at the statutory level: replace the tax code — with all its hiding places for abuse — with the flat tax or national sales tax.

Common Cause v. Biden, challenging the Senate filibuster, was "a nostalgic evocation of the old days of public law litigation."

Observes Garrett Epps.

The federal courts have become almost implacably hostile to this kind of reform lawsuit, and those who bring them know that their chances of victory are vanishingly slim. Whatever one may think of the filibuster, however, we can be glad this suit was dismissed; its cure for the filibuster would be worse than the disease.