Requiem for the Supreme Court

[ashling]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/supreme-court-loses-its-special-status/572416/?utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=the-atlantic-fb-test-446-1-&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_medium=social


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After the Senate confirmed Brett Kavanaugh on Saturday, I remembered that boy six decades ago who asked his parents, What was the Supreme Court?

The Supreme Court, they told me, was an institution to which they felt a deep allegiance, whether they agreed with its decisions or not. In their lives, and in the lives of all around me, I saw a society reluctantly but inevitably summoned to move forward not simply by the language of the Constitution but also by acceptance of the Court as an independent arbiter of the rule of law.

Critically, skeptically, but deeply, I loved that Supreme Court. Where is it? Where is the Court that claimed it was at least striving to transcend partisan politics?

That Court is gone forever. We will spend at least the rest of my lifetime fighting over its rotting corpse. No prating about civility can change that fact. The fight is upon us now, and the party that shirks it will be destroyed.

In Robert Bolt’s screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia, Prince Faisal speaks to Major T. E. Lawrence of the glories of medieval Islamic civilization: “In the Arab city of Córdoba, there were two miles of public lighting in the streets when London was a village,” he says.

But in the 20th century, Faisal sees that before him is not glory but war. “Now my father is old,” he says. “And I, I long for the vanished gardens of Córdoba. However, before the gardens must come the fighting.”

I, too, long for vanished gardens fair beyond words, for that long, eventful postwar peace in the shadow of the law and the Supreme Court that clumsily preserved it.

We did not know then that shadows were falling on that peace; we did not suspect then how fragile those institutions were; we did not imagine then how eagerly some of our fellow Americans would pull them down.