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What's Missing from the Supreme Court
ON THE BENCH
What’s Missing from the Supreme Court
America’s top justices are less like the rest of America than ever before.
By JOHN F. HARRIS and MATTHEW NUSSBAUM July 11, 2018
If Brett Kavanaugh’s swift, steady climb up the American legal ladder clears one more rung, the Supreme Court of the United States will have a majority of justices, five of them, who as young adults previously worked there in intensely coveted positions as clerks.
It will have seven justices who before joining the Court worked in pivotal chapters of their careers as favored subordinates to powerful figures in Washington, D.C. It will have eight people who served tenures on federal appellate courts. ... And it will have nine justices — all of them — who took their legal educations at Harvard or Yale. This actually represents no change, since retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy also went to Harvard. ... Kavanaugh’s ascension would further ratify a trend that has been building for a generation: a Court of careerists.
A generation of apple-polishers and resume jockeys is one byproduct of the decades-long partisan war over control of the Court. Legal interest groups, such as the conservative Federalist Society, identify like-minded activists and scholars they hope will someday serve on appellate courts and the Supreme Court early in their professional lives. Presidents want to nominate justices who won’t offer personal or ideological surprises in the confirmation process or once on the bench.
Yet in nominating a conservative prodigy who checks all the conventional boxes — Yale Law, a Supreme Court clerkship, a stint in the Bush White House — President Donald Trump guaranteed that the Court will again have zero members who have ever held elective office. Only one who ever served in the U.S. military (Samuel Alito, for three months active duty in 1975 followed by several years in the Army reserves). Zero who started a business. Zero who went abroad with the Peace Corps. Zero, even, who zigged and zagged through their twenties or early thirties — in the way that millions of ultimately successful Americans have done — between travel here, a false career start there, a wandering path in which they wondered with an open mind what they really wanted to do in life.
....
John F. Harris is editor-in-chief of POLITICO and author of “The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House.“
Matthew Nussbaum is a White House reporter for POLITICO.
What’s Missing from the Supreme Court
America’s top justices are less like the rest of America than ever before.
By JOHN F. HARRIS and MATTHEW NUSSBAUM July 11, 2018
If Brett Kavanaugh’s swift, steady climb up the American legal ladder clears one more rung, the Supreme Court of the United States will have a majority of justices, five of them, who as young adults previously worked there in intensely coveted positions as clerks.
It will have seven justices who before joining the Court worked in pivotal chapters of their careers as favored subordinates to powerful figures in Washington, D.C. It will have eight people who served tenures on federal appellate courts. ... And it will have nine justices — all of them — who took their legal educations at Harvard or Yale. This actually represents no change, since retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy also went to Harvard. ... Kavanaugh’s ascension would further ratify a trend that has been building for a generation: a Court of careerists.
A generation of apple-polishers and resume jockeys is one byproduct of the decades-long partisan war over control of the Court. Legal interest groups, such as the conservative Federalist Society, identify like-minded activists and scholars they hope will someday serve on appellate courts and the Supreme Court early in their professional lives. Presidents want to nominate justices who won’t offer personal or ideological surprises in the confirmation process or once on the bench.
Yet in nominating a conservative prodigy who checks all the conventional boxes — Yale Law, a Supreme Court clerkship, a stint in the Bush White House — President Donald Trump guaranteed that the Court will again have zero members who have ever held elective office. Only one who ever served in the U.S. military (Samuel Alito, for three months active duty in 1975 followed by several years in the Army reserves). Zero who started a business. Zero who went abroad with the Peace Corps. Zero, even, who zigged and zagged through their twenties or early thirties — in the way that millions of ultimately successful Americans have done — between travel here, a false career start there, a wandering path in which they wondered with an open mind what they really wanted to do in life.
....
John F. Harris is editor-in-chief of POLITICO and author of “The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House.“
Matthew Nussbaum is a White House reporter for POLITICO.
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