The long absence of justice

I think I went into the Alito hearings with a kind of willful deafness -- the deafness positively required of older Americans who think their country is going to hell in a handbasket.  My main issue was not abortion but (to put it succinctly) "checks and balances," and something else which is best summed up as a respect for humanity.  But I didn't have words for the latter until I read Michael O'Hare's piece at Mark Kleiman's blog this morning.  I always like what I read there, but now and again Mark and his fellow bloggers yell past my defensive deafness and wake me up. 

Alito knows the law, but he doesn't seem to know, or care about, The Law. Every issue in the hearings was immediately reduced by the nominee to a technical question of almost bureaucratic rule manipulation. This approach is a good one for nearly all the cases courts hear, but it's not what the Supreme Court is about.

He doesn't have a screw loose; what he has is a piece missing, conspicuously, radiantly, displaying the absence of any sense of, well, justice. Not a case came up for discussion in which he registered that one or another outcome was just wrong, outrageous to a sense of decency, or to him. He's on record in a memo as believing that to shoot an eighth grader, known not to be armed, who was trying to climb over a fence in escape, is a proper use of deadly force by a policeman. In a discussion of immigration cases that have been regularly occasioning inexcusable, vile, un-American heartbreak on people who missed obscure deadlines or violated arcane requirements, all he could say was that the courts get bad transcripts and it was hard to find translators for some of the plaintiffs, but that was a problem for Congress. It wasn't exactly Pilate washing his hands, but the man appears to be completely comfortable dealing with frightful social wrongs by moving the issue down the hall to another office. Sometimes the Court has to do this, but to Alito it's an especially good day's work, not a disappointment.

A smart, decent, small man. If the US Supreme Court is a good place for a man whose ability to prove "not my job" is unparalleled, Alito should be confirmed. He will focus enormous rational power on issues not central to the cases before him, and solve problems peripheral to the work we need the court to do.

It's when O'Hare writes "Pilate washing his hands" that I realized this numb-brained absence of social conscience is exactly what was missing in America, its ethic, and in American Christianity (in all its Protestant forms), when I returned after twenty years' absence.  Somewhere in the mid-'60's, we lost it.

"Long absence of justice."  If we still respected justice, would Bush be president? would economic disparities be so great? would we still have an unevenly applied death penalty?  would we continue to have one of the poorest educational systems in the modern world? and would we elevate small, limited people to our highest court?

NB:  I've noticed change in format (nice! easy to read!) at Mark Kleiman but I obviously need to drink stronger coffee or I would have noticed that Mark has also taken on writers/partners at the blog.  Apologies to Michael O'Hare who wrote the piece quoted above.  Corrections have been made, hair shirt donned, coffee dosage increased!

Comments

[Michael O'Hare]

Thanks for the nice link. But note that the Reality-Based Community is a group blog and Mark no longer has to write it all.

[PW]

Oops, sorry Michael!