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Times Watch for July 1, 2003

The “Conservative” Supreme Court? 

Tuesday’s front page features a sprawling run-down of the Supreme Court’s just-completed term by court reporter Linda Greenhouse. Titled “In a Momentous Term, Justices Remake the Law, and the Court,” Greenhouse marvels that “In an amazing final week, the court preserved affirmative action in university admissions.”

     After saying “the indisputably conservative” Chief Justice William Rehnquist was “almost a centrist in the court’s current spectrum,” Greenhouse went on to position Justice Sandra Day O’Connor as the court’s pivot point between the Court’s conservatives and…the Court’s other justices.

     See, despite the court’s liberal rulings on racial preferences and gay rights, Greenhouse still holds to her previously aired conviction that the Court lacks liberal voices. She writes on Tuesday: “Justice O'Connor was in the majority this term in all but 2 of the 14 5-to-4 decisions. In five of those, including two that upheld California's three-strikes sentencing law, she cast her vote with her more conservative colleagues. In four others, including the Michigan law school case and a case that preserved a nationwide program that provides money for legal services for the poor, she voted with Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer.”

     Jonah Goldberg comments sarcastically on Greenhouse’s labeling pattern at National Review Online: “When [Justice O’Connor] votes with the trogs on the Right they're ‘conservative colleagues.’ But when O'Connor votes with the liberals she joins the ranks of independent-minded scholars and jurists who defy easy labeling.”

For the rest of Greenhouse’s evaluation of the Supreme Court’s last term, click here.

• Affirmative Action | Discrimination | Linda Greenhouse | Labeling Bias | Racial Preferences | Supreme Court

Chris Hedges’ Love for Local Lefties

Times reporter Chris Hedges, booed off a college commencement stage back in May for a tone-deaf anti-war rant, returns to his usual home for Tuesday’s Public Lives section, contributing another loving profile of a local lefty, in this case Brooklyn judge Gustin Reichbach.

     Hedges’ profile of Reichbach is titled “A Judge in the Mold of Hoffman (Abbie, That Is).” He notes that Reichbach, a justice for the state Supreme Court in Brooklyn, “does not want respectability to tarnish his credentials as a former student radical.”

     Hedges writes: “Over the jury box, he has a picture of Paul Robeson, whose career was largely destroyed by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and on the wall over his bench, a scale of justice in red and blue neon lights. On the back wall, he has a picture of striking coal miners.”
One wonders how Hedges feels about the Alabama judge who posted the Ten Commandments in his courtroom. More importantly, as Barry Finger notes in New Politics, Paul Robeson was an unapologetic Stalinist.

     Finger explains: “Robeson greeted the Soviet Constitution imposed on the Soviet people in 1936 on the eve of the great purge trials as ‘an expression of democracy, broader in scope and loftier in principle than ever before expressed.’ Of these show trials, Robeson was quoted as saying that the USSR had dealt properly in the trial of the ‘counterrevolutionaries... they ought to destroy anybody who seeks to harm that great country.’ For Robeson the Soviet invasion of Poland (prearranged with Hitler) and of Finland (which met with the Wehrmacht's approval) were ‘defensive,’ a justifiable response to thwart Britain's designs against Russia.”

     Reporter Hedges’ chronology is implausible since Joseph McCarthy wasn’t elected to the Senate until 1947 and didn’t make his famous speech about Communists in the State Department until 1950. Paul Robeson’s last movie, “Tales of Manhattan,” was released in 1942, a full five years before McCarthy’s ascent to the Senate. That same year, Robeson said he wouldn't make any more films until there were better roles for blacks. Joe McCarthy had nothing to do with it, Hedges’ fantasies of “McCarthyism” notwithstanding.

For the rest of Chris Hedges’ profile of Justice Gustin Reichbach, click here.

• Chris Hedges | McCarthyism | Paul Robeson