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My nephew Scott was recently made a judge in Virginia, which isn’t exactly headline news for the rest of you, but pretty cool for me, even though it makes me think you have to be pretty old for someone to call you a judge’s uncle.
I went to the ceremony, which is called an investiture, which is sort of like a judicial version of a bar mitzvah. You get judge-like gifts (mostly with a gavel motif), people say nice things about you, and you give a speech. Fortunately for my nephew, no Hebrew school was required this time — just three years of law school and many more as an attorney.
The courtroom was packed with friends, colleagues and family, but not only friends, colleagues and family. Local politicians, too. And the Virginia speaker of the House, who showed up because circuit judges are appointed by a majority vote of the legislature.
Which brings us to the reason I’m writing this today, I mean besides being a proud uncle.
This was a political appointment — most judges are, of course, either appointed by elected officials or otherwise elected themselves — in a hyperpolitical time when it can often be hard to distinguish a smoke-free courtroom from a smoke-filled backroom.
I went to see my nephew in action and left his court thinking that maybe, just maybe, not all is lost.
Or maybe not.
I mean, Scott did become judge in a political appointment at the same time when Donald Trump — the former president who may be president again —routinely trashes judges, calls them dishonest and worse, suggests that a jury’s verdict is somehow corrupted by politics, implicitly makes the case that trust in the judicial system is just one more dispensable commodity, sort of like election law.
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And Scott got his political appointment in a time when a U.S. Supreme Court justice or two take expensive gifts and trips as a matter of course, when Supreme Court justices are the lone decider of their own ethical standing, when a justice, or maybe his wife, hangs a flag upside down to protest government policy and agrees, in a surreptitiously taped interview by a liberal filmmaker, that the nation needs to be godly.
And when the idea of justices calling balls and strikes — as Chief Justice Roberts claimed in his confirmation hearing — is held up for ridicule.
The Supreme Court rulings come fast and furious this time of year — and after each one, we seem to wonder, often furiously, whether the ruling is based on good jurisprudence or is a sophisticated version of jury rigging. I mean, the 6-3 conservative majority never would have happened without Mitch McConnell’s devious machinations.
For instance, the court rules unanimously that the complainants in a case involving the fate of a widely used abortion pill don’t have standing. It’s a ruling that ducked the real issue — in which justices could have sensibly decided that mifepristone is an FDA-approved drug that no one argues isn’t safe — but instead delayed it until presumably better complainants come along.
Meanwhile, maybe not coincidentally, Trump is presently trying to persuade Republican politicians to moderate their abortion stances — to speak “correctly” about abortion, at least until after the election. Did the six conservative justices get that message? We’ll see. There’s another abortion ruling coming.
It’s hard not to be cynical, especially when we have to keep waiting for the court to rule on the absurd notion that a president enjoys unlimited lifetime immunity from the law. By delaying the ruling, whatever the ruling happens to be, the justices already made it nearly impossible for this case to happen before Election Day. That, I’m sure, is a crime.
And the hits keep coming. On Friday, the six conservative justices overturned a Trump-era ban on bump stocks. Yes, after the horror of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, in which the killer fired 1,000 rounds in 11 minutes, even Trump knew something had to be done. A bump stock, which the killer employed, allows a semiautomatic gun to fire at the rate similar to a machine gun.
But the court ruled that bump stocks don’t strictly make a weapon qualify as a machine gun — the three liberal justices had a different view — and so back out on the streets the bump stocks go.
Unsurprisingly, Clarence Thomas wrote the opinion. The conservative justices said Congress could change the law. You should try not to laugh when you read that. I doubt the families of those killed in the deadliest shooting in the modern era are laughing.
But still, there’s another way to tell this story.
Just because my nephew was appointed by a legislature doesn’t mean he’s politically corrupt. I knew that, of course, but it was all reinforced when I went to see him do his judging thing. It was a Friday, meaning it was a day in his court to hear civil proceedings. He also hears criminal cases, though none, to this point, involving a former president paying off a porn star and then fixing the books.
There were no fireworks that morning. There was no showboating. There was a judge listening carefully to both sides of an argument. Scott helped a woman, who didn’t have an attorney, walk through a complicated part of her divorce suit. He tried to convince another divorced couple that not every move the other made was done with malice.
In a more complicated case, this new judge, still learning the ropes, had to decide what to do with an attorney who desperately wanted to walk away from a client who had basically disappeared. The opposing attorneys argued that the first attorney was the only link their clients still had in their efforts to collect a judgment.
My nephew the judge said he’d take it under advisement and would have to research the issue. He didn’t pretend to know more than he did. He didn’t dismiss the notion that both sides had legitimate points to make. He looked, well, judge-like.
The thing about the case, and all the cases that day, is that they had nothing to do with politics. They were just ordinary, run-of-the-mill cases, unless, that is, they were your cases.
As Scott said in his investiture speech, people often come to court as the place of last resort. It may not be where they want to be, but it’s a place where they believe, or hope anyway, they can be heard fairly and honestly.
It was strange being in a courtroom where all were required to rise upon the entrance of someone I’ve known since birth and at every other stage of his life — as father, son, husband, lawyer, now judge.
When he was 13, I took him with me to spring training as a bar mitzvah gift. He’s now nearly 50, and when I saw him in the courtroom that day and watched him at work, I knew just seeing him in his robes was his investiture gift to me. It was nearly enough to restore faith in, you know, truth, justice and the American way.
That feeling lasted all of a week, all the way until yet another hyperpartisan Supreme Court ruling would be handed down.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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