Your last hope for protecting the right to choose AND funny!
So liveblogging Stephen Breyer (Supreme Court justice! Live! NYU!) didn't so much as happen today, first because awesome wireless awesome bailed on me in the auditorium, and also because events suck when all you're doing is transcribing. Actually, Breyer was quite charming and witty, describing pretty well what it must be like to be a semi-normal human being who also happens to be a member of the Supreme Court. In the comedic vein, the highlight was his description of how, as the junior member of the Court, even after 11 years he has to be the one to go answer the door if someone knocks while they're in conference.
So he spent about twenty minutes disparaging John Roberts and another half hour roasting the corpse of William - actually, he didn't mention either individual, best I can recall. He did, however, make one political point I found interesting, namely that politicians flock to DC, but politicians would have a much bigger impact if they focused on state law. Breyer mentioned some obscenely high percentage of law is state law, so he concludes that state law has a greater impact.
Did I mention Breyer is awesome? He came in a pretty good-looking cream-colored suit, and I didn't even recognize him walking down the aisle. Good guy. Also, I think he's forgetting three things here:
1. Federal law affects the country, state law affects the state. So let's not forget that the much more uncommon federal law affects an average of 50 times as many people.
2. Federal law gets to cover more intellectual ground. If I cared that deeply about property taxes, I would go into state government. But there aren't a whole lot of state reps who can seriously affect intelligence or foreign policy issues, right?
3. Federal officeholders have the bully pulpit. Why, if it was a state official who brought up the issue, none of us would be eating freedom fries today!
By Breyer's rationale, political dorks like me should be headed back to state capitals to run for governor, theoretically the most important person in the most important kind of (I can't believe I'm using this word colloquially) jurisdiction. And it's not like people aren't running for governor, or that DC types don't already think that being a governor is the best preparation for the presidency. Now, I don't necessarily expect a Supreme Court justice (especially an awesome one like Breyer) not to think first of the law, but there's more than just the number of laws a politician writes, or the amount of cases it covers, that gives him political power. Just saying.
The conclusion: I am a lot smarter than a sitting Supreme Court justice. And he doesn't even have a blog!