The Supreme Court kicked off the October Term yesterday by taking part in the time-honored tradition of sticking it to anyone interested in shedding some light on the inner workings of the Court. Apparently unable to screw over SCOTUSBlog any more, the Court took aim at blocking the access of the last group of interested parties that it can unilaterally jack with: members of the Supreme Court bar.
The news spread like wildfire through Lawyer Twitter after Lawrence Hurley of Reuters reported the grim development:
Get in line: Supreme Court says members of the bar can no longer hire line-standers to wait in line for them
— Lawrence Hurley (@lawrencehurley) October 5, 2015
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Admittedly, the practice of hiring line-standers has gotten out of hand, with tickets to high-profile oral arguments running upwards of $6000. It’s high price tags like that that stick in the craw of hyper-idealists:
“Allowing line-standing companies and scalpers to sell seats in the Supreme Court is yet another instance of letting money dominate democracy,” Michael Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard, told The New York Times at the time. “It’s at odds with equal access and undermines the dignity of the court.”
Um… bulls**t. Last time I checked, the Supreme Court doesn’t offer open mic day — getting into an oral argument doesn’t invest anyone with influence over the decision, so maybe check yourself on labeling line-standers an existential threat to democracy. In a post-Citizens United world of unlimited and opaque SuperPAC contributions, to say there are bigger fish to fry than paying for seats at an oral argument is an insult to minnows. Moreover, the Court isn’t banning the practice writ large, only for the attorneys who rely upon line standers because their own billable hour businesses cannot survive sitting outside for days on end, so it’s hard to read this as a principled stance against the practice of buying access to the proceedings. In fact, throwing up more barriers to keep only the most informed and interested audience out of the courtroom seems more antithetical to transparency and democracy than paying some kid a couple grand.
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Now, Professor Sandel wasn’t responding to yesterday’s announcement, but I’ll bet he’d balk at the implication of this HuffPo article that he’d support “banning line-standers to save democracy” as opposed to, I don’t know, letting cameras in the courtroom. At the risk of introducing common sense to the policy decisions of the Roberts Court, if the goal of this reform were to end trafficking in ass placement, then the Court could easily gut the market by inviting C-SPAN into the courtroom.
But that’s not going to happen any time soon, so instead they’ll just placate the rabble with a cynical, half-hearted reform that only screws over the lawyers.
Nobody cares about those people anyway.
Supreme Court Stops Lawyers From Paying Line-Standers In Big Cases [Huffington Post]