I’ve heard of the Blackstone Rangers but not of the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, and I’d bet the former is a lot more ethical than the latter. For what it’s worth, originalism is a special kind of bullshit: it’s the legal equivalent of secret sauce, the experiment that can never be replicated, the miracle that the founders really meant what 21st century nutjobs believe in . What nonsense!
The Blackstone fellowship sounds like an egregious betrayal of the separation of church and state. I wonder what Justice Barrett's lectures on that Constitutional principle sounded like.
Alexandra Petri wrote her article in the Post today about this speech, but her too-precious sarcasm left me cold. Thank you for tackling ole Amy-wach-you-gonna-do with your surgical wit and analysis. Her speech makes me think she had someone ghost writing her law exams. It’s a stupid argument filled with one logical fallacy after another. I hope RBG haunts her every dream.
All those shadowy legal enterprises-the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, and the Federalist, should be barred from ever having any candidate nominated for the SC because they're not only partisan hacks but also religious fundamentalists operating under false pretenses.
We're closer to the Taliban than we'd like to think. Thanks to all those who pretend that there is no partisan hackery.
I wish sometimes Earl Warren had been cloned. At least we could have had some real legal jurisprudence in the court instead of slightly covered over religious mandates posing as legal doctrine.
In the great tradition of men not believing sexism exists (and if it does, they aren't sexists), and white people not believing racism exists (and if it does, *of course* they aren't racist -- how dare you even suggest it?), Amy Coney-Rabbit claims that partisan hackdom doesn't exist (and if it does, she and her reactionary colleagues are not partisan hacks). Got it: nothing to see here. Thanks for a great column -- I love to see my enemies skewered with style -- and especially the introduction to the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, of which I hadn't heard. I wonder if the Southern Poverty Law Center would consider classifying them as a hate group?
Lucian, there are all sorts of weird associations, filled with people overly impressed with themselves, such as the Federalist Society, and now this group of miscreants, apparently whose sole purpose in life is to cancel the Enlightenment, and take the law back to the Star Chamber, the Inquisition, with, in order of precedence we have the dungeon, the rack, and the stake to which heretics and nonconformists were tied as they were burned to death on the order of civil and religious authorities, acting together. At least spiritually, Justice Barrett seems to fit within that tradition; you might also include Mary, Queen of Scots and Queen Mary Tutor, the latter of which presided over numerous pressings (where accused offenders were suffocated to death using heavy stones, much the way George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis 18 months ago); burnings and beheadings of those whose loyalty to the Catholic Church was deemed suspect, or loyalty to the sovereign was questioned, as was the case of Sir Thomas More, who opposed King Henry's divorce of his Queen, Catherine of Aragon, in order to marry Anne him and Boleyn. These people didn't themselves more ecclesiastical than the Pope, because the papacy changes with the times even if the Roman Curia does not. These people are clear and present danger to republican principles as enunciated in the Constitution of the United States when it was drafted in 1787.
The idea, of course, was to sheathe the naked power of either the Sovereign, or the papacy in what was then the law of the time. It was a naked power grab, and independent-minded people had to keep their wits about them in order to keep their heads on their shoulders. Not too many years ago, in 1966, choose a film was made of Robert Bolt's adaptation of his dramatic stage play A Man for All Seasons, starring Paul Scofield As Sir Thomas More; Robert Shaw as King Henry VIII; Leo McKern, as Thomas Cromwell, and Susannah York, as Margaret More, Sir Thomas' daughter. Corin Redgrave plays William Roper, Sir Thomas' son-in-law, married to Margaret.
Thomas More's character stands for fealty to the law, and to his conscience, and for that, and for his refusal to give his blessing to King Henry's plan to annul his marriage to Catherine, Thomas is accused of treason and convicted on the false testimony of Richard Rich, and ultimately he is executed in the Tower of London. Him
These are the kinds of people we are dealing with, there is not a living faith, it is power, cloaked in dogma, and defended by a subtle casuistry that by intention and persistence erases moral and ethical, and legal, boundaries. The Trump administration was a paradigm of morally, ethically, and legally compromised behavior, by so many officials, and so pervasively across the board, that it is a wonder that we do not require GPS direction to get out of bed in the morning. In the situation of Justice Barrett, the law is clearly subordinate to her extreme Roman Catholic religious beliefs. The laws about allocation of powers, procedural requirements, boundaries that may not be transgressed, in addition to a pursuit of regular order and substantial justice. Barrett's religious predilections do end runs around those requirements, all in the name of a 'greater good'. That 'greater good' is Barrett's personal theology, I shared with her communicants who believe roughly the same thing. They are as un-American as the Ku Klux Klan. If given power, they would be the American Taliban. For these people, church and state merge by virtue of the shared power that they hold, or purport to hold. That is medievalist in outlook, and contrary to the dictates of the Constitution. This is a violation of the First Amendment's prohibition on the establishment of religion per se. The Drafters of the Constitution well understood the dangers of allowing religious zealots access to the levers of governmental power. On this basis alone Justice Barrett is disqualified from being a sitting judge, as she is allowing her religious beliefs in their most extreme form to limit and direct her judgment in cases coming before her.
I get nervous whenever people cite Thomas More as standing for some sort of impartial fealty to the principles of fealty to "the law," etc. Thomas More was a huge fan of what we once referred to as "enhanced interrogation techniques" when the subjects involved were Protestants ( let's not even mention the few Jews around then, but I can mention Dr. Lopez's torture and tortured execution when Elizabeth was Queen), prior to Henry's split with Rome. "A Man for All Seasons" is a worthy work OF FICTION. Paul Scofield was a magnificent actor with a unique (and uniquely effective) vocal timbre. But he wasn't Sir Thomas More. "A Man for All Seasons" is fiction. Fiction. The real Thomas Moore would've been very quick to have most of us drawn and quartered. Look it up.
I would agree with you on that. The docudrama focuses on More's fidelity to the law as a protector against arbitrary authority. I wanted to mention that magnificent scene where More's daughter and son-in-law, Roper, debate with More about whether More, as Henry's attorney General should order the arrest of Richard Rich, for scheming with Thomas Cromwell and Woolsey to implicate More in a perjurious bribery scheme involving a silver cup that was given to More as bribe, but which he refused.
Arrest him, declared Roper.
More demurs: Why, He's broken no law.
He's a bad man. He's broken God's law.
Well, if that is the case, let God prosecute him. We enforce Man's law... (and here I'm paraphrasing from my recollection of the scene)
England is criss-crossed. with laws that act like walls and fences to regulate behavior. You, Roper, would knock down all the laws, and you're just the man to do it. In you knocked down all of England's laws to get at the Devil, what would you look to to protect you, when the Devil turns on you!
The real Thomas More, I believe, would respect the law and its restrictions on interrogations and prosecutions. Meaning, the American Constitution, including the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments. Understand, hardliners do what the law sanctions and professional ethics permit. On More occasions than I can count, I've studied the Department of Justice's Criminal Resource Manual in the course of representing indigent federal criminal defendants in the federal Court of Appeals for the First Circuit during the 1990s. Most of those Appeals were technical and procedural in nature.
Adherence to the rule of law is the obligation of all lawyers, and government lawyers in particular. I was one of them. As appointed counsel, then in private law practice, I represented a neutral point of view, sympathetic to the Government's policy objectives, but focused on whether they met their burden of proof.. I will tell you that the hardest appellate brief to write is the so -called Anders Brief, which requires me to do a full bore review of the entire case, raising hypothetical defenses that were not raised at trial, or which were subsequently abandoned. I've had to do several of those briefs, and I lost no sleep in finding that in all cases the Government met its burden of proof. The one case where I prevailed in the appeal, the Government was on notice from the getgo that they were using inadmissible evidence in the form of 'double hearsay': statements within statements, each of which requires an exception to the Hearsay Rule in order to be admitted into evidence.
Bottom line, A Man for All Seasons, is a fiction; but the legal principles at stake are very real. Earl Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, would have agreed.
That's an extremely good analysis and I ALMOST believe it. But from my point of view, More's feeling that he was honoring God's law (which is, needless to say, nonexistent) by torturing and executing what he considered non-believers (whose main crime, let's remember, was wanting to read the Bible for themselves) remains very, very scary. My New Testament chops are almost nonexistent when you get past the gospels, but I sorta think there aren't any passages there explicitly allowing torture (the Tanakh is obviously another story...I recall at least one deal where the Israelites are ordered to collect the foreskins of the guys they killed in battle...remember the Moel joke..."But rub it and it becomes a footlocker?"). But hey...maybe my take on More is based a lot on the high quality of Hilary Mantel's writing; I just can't get past thinking of More as very, very priggish and very, very dangerous. Not unlike today's evangelical scumbags.
Those were cruel times, where death was common punishment, and torture simply the first step. This was a century before the 30 Years War. We don't kill people for heresy, strictly speaking. But our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan show us to be equally vulnerable to the psychology of committing mass killings for political reasons. Bombs and missiles do that all the time.
We were warned about her from people who know her. But, hey! We also let REPUGS break laws and threaten democracy for 150 years without dealing with the threat—even before Nixon. Then, Reagan (and Cheney) pulled off Iran-Contra drug escapades and passed off their Koch Libertarian Lies about “trickle down economics.” For this, they were worshipped. I don’t need to rehash Bush-Cheney, but Boy! Cheney sure got rich…as has McCONnell. The Trump years now trump America’s all-time government corruption, yet we only hand out a slap on the Seditionists. Both Reagan and Trump were mentally incompetent while in office—nothing was done. We’ve handled this democracy shabbily. I don’t think it’s a democracy for much longer.
Originalism my ass. How come the 2nd amendment is redacted in black marker by the "originalists"? See par about "well regulated militia". Originalism is used when it fits the program.
Lucian, You've got to lighten up and believe someone who thinks differently than you. Are all conservatives "political hacks?" How about Edmund Burke.?
She used the phrase "political hack" and raised the issue causing me to take a closer look at her. Anyone with the connections she has to conservative political interests such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, who has accepted payment from them for participating in their training program for conservative legal activists, is in my opinion a political hack. She doth protesteth too much.k
Stop with the silly Edmund Burke thing. To these folks, Edmund Burke would be considered a "radical." People love to cite him as some kind of founding member of this particular "Conservative Movement." Definitions have a nasty way of changing from century to century. And I've always thought that Burke's issues with the French Revolution had everything to do with his crush on Marie Antionette.
Well, as an "originalist", she shouldn't even be voting, much less sitting on the Supreme Court. Full of shit, indeed.......
I’ve heard of the Blackstone Rangers but not of the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, and I’d bet the former is a lot more ethical than the latter. For what it’s worth, originalism is a special kind of bullshit: it’s the legal equivalent of secret sauce, the experiment that can never be replicated, the miracle that the founders really meant what 21st century nutjobs believe in . What nonsense!
The Blackstone fellowship sounds like an egregious betrayal of the separation of church and state. I wonder what Justice Barrett's lectures on that Constitutional principle sounded like.
Alexandra Petri wrote her article in the Post today about this speech, but her too-precious sarcasm left me cold. Thank you for tackling ole Amy-wach-you-gonna-do with your surgical wit and analysis. Her speech makes me think she had someone ghost writing her law exams. It’s a stupid argument filled with one logical fallacy after another. I hope RBG haunts her every dream.
All those shadowy legal enterprises-the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, and the Federalist, should be barred from ever having any candidate nominated for the SC because they're not only partisan hacks but also religious fundamentalists operating under false pretenses.
We're closer to the Taliban than we'd like to think. Thanks to all those who pretend that there is no partisan hackery.
I wish sometimes Earl Warren had been cloned. At least we could have had some real legal jurisprudence in the court instead of slightly covered over religious mandates posing as legal doctrine.
As a semi-sentient being, i feel very ill. One can only eat so much s**t
In the great tradition of men not believing sexism exists (and if it does, they aren't sexists), and white people not believing racism exists (and if it does, *of course* they aren't racist -- how dare you even suggest it?), Amy Coney-Rabbit claims that partisan hackdom doesn't exist (and if it does, she and her reactionary colleagues are not partisan hacks). Got it: nothing to see here. Thanks for a great column -- I love to see my enemies skewered with style -- and especially the introduction to the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, of which I hadn't heard. I wonder if the Southern Poverty Law Center would consider classifying them as a hate group?
Lucian, there are all sorts of weird associations, filled with people overly impressed with themselves, such as the Federalist Society, and now this group of miscreants, apparently whose sole purpose in life is to cancel the Enlightenment, and take the law back to the Star Chamber, the Inquisition, with, in order of precedence we have the dungeon, the rack, and the stake to which heretics and nonconformists were tied as they were burned to death on the order of civil and religious authorities, acting together. At least spiritually, Justice Barrett seems to fit within that tradition; you might also include Mary, Queen of Scots and Queen Mary Tutor, the latter of which presided over numerous pressings (where accused offenders were suffocated to death using heavy stones, much the way George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis 18 months ago); burnings and beheadings of those whose loyalty to the Catholic Church was deemed suspect, or loyalty to the sovereign was questioned, as was the case of Sir Thomas More, who opposed King Henry's divorce of his Queen, Catherine of Aragon, in order to marry Anne him and Boleyn. These people didn't themselves more ecclesiastical than the Pope, because the papacy changes with the times even if the Roman Curia does not. These people are clear and present danger to republican principles as enunciated in the Constitution of the United States when it was drafted in 1787.
The idea, of course, was to sheathe the naked power of either the Sovereign, or the papacy in what was then the law of the time. It was a naked power grab, and independent-minded people had to keep their wits about them in order to keep their heads on their shoulders. Not too many years ago, in 1966, choose a film was made of Robert Bolt's adaptation of his dramatic stage play A Man for All Seasons, starring Paul Scofield As Sir Thomas More; Robert Shaw as King Henry VIII; Leo McKern, as Thomas Cromwell, and Susannah York, as Margaret More, Sir Thomas' daughter. Corin Redgrave plays William Roper, Sir Thomas' son-in-law, married to Margaret.
Thomas More's character stands for fealty to the law, and to his conscience, and for that, and for his refusal to give his blessing to King Henry's plan to annul his marriage to Catherine, Thomas is accused of treason and convicted on the false testimony of Richard Rich, and ultimately he is executed in the Tower of London. Him
These are the kinds of people we are dealing with, there is not a living faith, it is power, cloaked in dogma, and defended by a subtle casuistry that by intention and persistence erases moral and ethical, and legal, boundaries. The Trump administration was a paradigm of morally, ethically, and legally compromised behavior, by so many officials, and so pervasively across the board, that it is a wonder that we do not require GPS direction to get out of bed in the morning. In the situation of Justice Barrett, the law is clearly subordinate to her extreme Roman Catholic religious beliefs. The laws about allocation of powers, procedural requirements, boundaries that may not be transgressed, in addition to a pursuit of regular order and substantial justice. Barrett's religious predilections do end runs around those requirements, all in the name of a 'greater good'. That 'greater good' is Barrett's personal theology, I shared with her communicants who believe roughly the same thing. They are as un-American as the Ku Klux Klan. If given power, they would be the American Taliban. For these people, church and state merge by virtue of the shared power that they hold, or purport to hold. That is medievalist in outlook, and contrary to the dictates of the Constitution. This is a violation of the First Amendment's prohibition on the establishment of religion per se. The Drafters of the Constitution well understood the dangers of allowing religious zealots access to the levers of governmental power. On this basis alone Justice Barrett is disqualified from being a sitting judge, as she is allowing her religious beliefs in their most extreme form to limit and direct her judgment in cases coming before her.
I get nervous whenever people cite Thomas More as standing for some sort of impartial fealty to the principles of fealty to "the law," etc. Thomas More was a huge fan of what we once referred to as "enhanced interrogation techniques" when the subjects involved were Protestants ( let's not even mention the few Jews around then, but I can mention Dr. Lopez's torture and tortured execution when Elizabeth was Queen), prior to Henry's split with Rome. "A Man for All Seasons" is a worthy work OF FICTION. Paul Scofield was a magnificent actor with a unique (and uniquely effective) vocal timbre. But he wasn't Sir Thomas More. "A Man for All Seasons" is fiction. Fiction. The real Thomas Moore would've been very quick to have most of us drawn and quartered. Look it up.
I would agree with you on that. The docudrama focuses on More's fidelity to the law as a protector against arbitrary authority. I wanted to mention that magnificent scene where More's daughter and son-in-law, Roper, debate with More about whether More, as Henry's attorney General should order the arrest of Richard Rich, for scheming with Thomas Cromwell and Woolsey to implicate More in a perjurious bribery scheme involving a silver cup that was given to More as bribe, but which he refused.
Arrest him, declared Roper.
More demurs: Why, He's broken no law.
He's a bad man. He's broken God's law.
Well, if that is the case, let God prosecute him. We enforce Man's law... (and here I'm paraphrasing from my recollection of the scene)
England is criss-crossed. with laws that act like walls and fences to regulate behavior. You, Roper, would knock down all the laws, and you're just the man to do it. In you knocked down all of England's laws to get at the Devil, what would you look to to protect you, when the Devil turns on you!
The real Thomas More, I believe, would respect the law and its restrictions on interrogations and prosecutions. Meaning, the American Constitution, including the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments. Understand, hardliners do what the law sanctions and professional ethics permit. On More occasions than I can count, I've studied the Department of Justice's Criminal Resource Manual in the course of representing indigent federal criminal defendants in the federal Court of Appeals for the First Circuit during the 1990s. Most of those Appeals were technical and procedural in nature.
Adherence to the rule of law is the obligation of all lawyers, and government lawyers in particular. I was one of them. As appointed counsel, then in private law practice, I represented a neutral point of view, sympathetic to the Government's policy objectives, but focused on whether they met their burden of proof.. I will tell you that the hardest appellate brief to write is the so -called Anders Brief, which requires me to do a full bore review of the entire case, raising hypothetical defenses that were not raised at trial, or which were subsequently abandoned. I've had to do several of those briefs, and I lost no sleep in finding that in all cases the Government met its burden of proof. The one case where I prevailed in the appeal, the Government was on notice from the getgo that they were using inadmissible evidence in the form of 'double hearsay': statements within statements, each of which requires an exception to the Hearsay Rule in order to be admitted into evidence.
Bottom line, A Man for All Seasons, is a fiction; but the legal principles at stake are very real. Earl Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, would have agreed.
That's an extremely good analysis and I ALMOST believe it. But from my point of view, More's feeling that he was honoring God's law (which is, needless to say, nonexistent) by torturing and executing what he considered non-believers (whose main crime, let's remember, was wanting to read the Bible for themselves) remains very, very scary. My New Testament chops are almost nonexistent when you get past the gospels, but I sorta think there aren't any passages there explicitly allowing torture (the Tanakh is obviously another story...I recall at least one deal where the Israelites are ordered to collect the foreskins of the guys they killed in battle...remember the Moel joke..."But rub it and it becomes a footlocker?"). But hey...maybe my take on More is based a lot on the high quality of Hilary Mantel's writing; I just can't get past thinking of More as very, very priggish and very, very dangerous. Not unlike today's evangelical scumbags.
Those were cruel times, where death was common punishment, and torture simply the first step. This was a century before the 30 Years War. We don't kill people for heresy, strictly speaking. But our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan show us to be equally vulnerable to the psychology of committing mass killings for political reasons. Bombs and missiles do that all the time.
It’s the Federalist Society Lucian.
I was about to say the same thing....
You are correct on every single count. Dems need to get moving and take back the court, by whatever legal means possible - NOW.
We were warned about her from people who know her. But, hey! We also let REPUGS break laws and threaten democracy for 150 years without dealing with the threat—even before Nixon. Then, Reagan (and Cheney) pulled off Iran-Contra drug escapades and passed off their Koch Libertarian Lies about “trickle down economics.” For this, they were worshipped. I don’t need to rehash Bush-Cheney, but Boy! Cheney sure got rich…as has McCONnell. The Trump years now trump America’s all-time government corruption, yet we only hand out a slap on the Seditionists. Both Reagan and Trump were mentally incompetent while in office—nothing was done. We’ve handled this democracy shabbily. I don’t think it’s a democracy for much longer.
I weep for our country.
The Scalia connection...all we need to know. She is a traitor to her sex, and it will get worse.
Originalism my ass. How come the 2nd amendment is redacted in black marker by the "originalists"? See par about "well regulated militia". Originalism is used when it fits the program.
Lucian, You've got to lighten up and believe someone who thinks differently than you. Are all conservatives "political hacks?" How about Edmund Burke.?
She used the phrase "political hack" and raised the issue causing me to take a closer look at her. Anyone with the connections she has to conservative political interests such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, who has accepted payment from them for participating in their training program for conservative legal activists, is in my opinion a political hack. She doth protesteth too much.k
Stop with the silly Edmund Burke thing. To these folks, Edmund Burke would be considered a "radical." People love to cite him as some kind of founding member of this particular "Conservative Movement." Definitions have a nasty way of changing from century to century. And I've always thought that Burke's issues with the French Revolution had everything to do with his crush on Marie Antionette.
David I like your analysis. Nice to find a modern liberal who reads something other than leftist folklore.
Thanks so much, Robert. I really appreciate your comment.
Dripping with irony. I like it.
The Taliban would appear to be Kindred Spirits -- who believe that Infidels should be silenced.