Law | Benjamin Studebaker

September 25, 2020

The Fear Surrounding the Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is Unhealthy

Over the past week, there has been a very strong emotional reaction to the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I am not talking about the grief–it is perfectly normal for Ginsburg’s many admirers to grieve her loss. But it has gone beyond grief. There is a climate of intense fear surrounding Ginsburg’s death. Over the past few months, the Democrats have tried to make the 2020 election feel existential. They want us to feel that we have to vote for Biden, because otherwise democracy itself will be destroyed. This has led to a lot of exaggeration. I have been reluctant to write on it, because the reactions people are having are so extreme. But contrary to the increasingly hysterical narrative, there is little reason to think that Ginsburg’s death will have massive political consequences. Here’s why.

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October 6, 2018

The Supreme Court Post-Kavanaugh: A Grand Strategy for the Left

Now that it’s become clear that we’ve failed to stop Brett Kavanaugh, a fascinating debate is brewing about what the American left’s position ought to be with respect to the Supreme Court going forward. There are two big, radical proposals vying for people’s attention and support:

Gather the senate supermajority necessary to impeach and convict Kavanaugh over the next several election cycles, then replace him with a Democratic Party nominee in 2021, 2023, or 2025.
Gather a simple majority in the senate and a Democratic president and revive Franklin Roosevelt’s court-packing plan, increasing the number of Supreme Court justices until the court is forcibly shifted to the left.

I want to discuss the merits and demerits of both approaches and propose a long-term strategy that I think will be more effective than immediately picking up and running with either.

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October 1, 2018

Remember When Americans Cared about Perjury?

My friend Nathan Robinson has written an excellent piece documenting with care and detail all the times Brett Kavanaugh appears to have committed perjury during the recent hearing. Robinson’s work is around 10,000 words long, because the number of instances of perjury or possible perjury is stunning. It’s almost as if Kavanaugh–a man attempting to be a Supreme Court justice–doesn’t think perjury matters. And it appears that to millions of Americans it doesn’t. Many still want Kavanaugh confirmed, and 11 senators voted to move Kavanaugh out of committee even after he repeatedly lied to their faces. This reminds me of another case in American history–the case of Alger Hiss.

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September 28, 2018

The Kavanaugh Hearings Encapsulate the Rampant Emotionalism of American Politics

The British have a visceral hatred for Donald Trump. It’s not because of his positions on immigration or tax policy–there are plenty of European politicians who are at least as far right as Trump is, substantively. No, it’s because of the way Trump presents himself. He’s combative, he gets angry, he makes flippant, emotional remarks. When British politicians show emotion it exposes them as weak, out of control, and unstable. If a British politician shouts or cries in public–especially in a formal setting–it’s embarrassing. It’s not proper behaviour. Everyone in Britain knows, from an early age, that this is just not how politicians are supposed to behave. They like their leaders calm, stoic, controlled. This is less true than it used to be–for a time, Tony Blair got away with wearing his heart on his sleeve. But there were always those who made fun of it, who thought it “un-British”. Whenever a British politician makes an emotional display and gets away with it, there is a chunk of British people who write nervous columns about creeping Americanisation. Having spent some years in the UK, I can spot the kind of American politics they hate a mile off. And it has never been so blatant, so in-your-face, as this senate hearing for Brett Kavanaugh.

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September 27, 2018

The Republicans are Sticking with Kavanaugh for Purely Political Reasons

Remember when Antonin Scalia died and Barack Obama tried to replace him? I remember because on that occasion I wrote one of the most mistaken pieces I’ve ever published on this site: “How Obama Can Replace Scalia“. In that piece, I argued that because previous Supreme Court justices had been replaced in time periods much shorter than the remainder of Obama’s term, Obama would surely also be able to replace Scalia before leaving office. After all, if Republicans attempted to block him for almost a full year, the public would be furious with them for playing politics with the court, and would play a price at the 2016 election. I even had a nice chart:

Scalia Replacement

I was completely wrong about this because I underestimated the degree to which the Supreme Court has become transparently political, even in the eyes of ordinary Americans. Our political parties hardly even have to excuse politicising the court (though they try to do so anyway). We all know that some of the justices are conservative and some are liberal, even if they couch their political ideology behind legal theories like “originalism” and “textualism”. We recognise that there is no such thing as an apolitical judge, that when judges claim to be politically neutral they are being disingenuous. So we now treat Supreme Court nominations like any other political issue and fight tooth and nail to ensure that the next judge is someone we can ideologically live with. And we may have to live with their ideology a long time–between presidents picking younger judges and judges living longer, the average bench time for a Supreme Court justice has quietly increased by around a decade. Having learnt from my mistakes, I now look at the fight to replace Anthony Kennedy quite differently.

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Tag: Law