Justice, SCOTUS

Time For Our Biennial Conversation About Cameras At The Supreme Court

I'm not against cameras, I'm for other reforms to make the Court transparent.

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(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

It’s become something of a tradition: every new Congress proposes a bipartisan bill to put cameras in the Supreme Court.

The bill always goes nowhere. The Court treats transparency like it’s an assault. I find it insulting that nine people who presume to tell me what expectation of privacy I have when I text my boss feel like they have the right to conduct public hearings outside the withering glare of C-SPAN, but they do.

This session’s soon-to-be-failed attempt to bring the Supreme Court into the 1970s was re-introduced by Representatives Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) and Ted Poe (R-Texas).

“Our nation’s highest court is not some ‘mystical priesthood’ that can operate outside of the public view,” said Connolly in reintroducing the bill. “It is a coequal branch of government and must be accountable to the American public. In today’s digital age, it strains credulity that this modest effort at transparency would prove impossible or somehow inhibit the ability of our Justices to hear cases in a fair manner.”

I’m all for cameras in the Court because it would make my job easier. But let’s be real, the Supreme Court is NOT “accountable to the American public.” Their lack of accountability is kind of the whole point.

A camera isn’t going to change that. Clarence Thomas isn’t going to become loquacious because you put a camera in his face. Ruth Bader Ginsburg isn’t going to stay awake. Samuel Alito is not going to think, “Hmm… women might be watching this feed instead of cooking or delivering babies; I should carefully place my knuckles on the table as opposed to letting them drag on the floor like usual.”

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Look, there’s an argument that oral arguments themselves are a gigantic waste of everybody’s time. It’s not like justices are making their decisions based on an hour of banter with counsel. Supreme Court justices… read. And research — or at least their clerks do. Do you want to put a camera on that? “It’s, oh no, Anthony Kennedy is reaching for… Adam Smith’s Lectures on Justice. LOST! Now we’ll NEVER get universal sales taxes on goods purchased online.”

The fact that cameras won’t change the behavior of the justices is, of course, a reason to have them as much it’s a reason to prohibit them. But there is a legitimate worry that cameras would change the behavior of lawyers. And the last thing we need is appellate lawyers mugging for the crowd. Honestly, those guys already think they’ re starring in Inherit The Wind.

Again, it’s not that I’m against cameras, it’s that I’m for other reforms that would make the Court way more transparent than a video record of their already public hearings. I’d like to know, for instance, what the vote breakdown is for grants of certiorari. That’s news I can use. I’d like to see their initial votes on a case, so I can track changes when the final opinion comes out later. I’D LIKE AN ACTUAL RECUSAL PROCESS, instead of our current “honor system” way of dealing with Supreme bias. Give me some of that, and you can conduct oral arguments in a bunker witnessed by blind scribes for all I care.

But sure, by refusing to put cameras in the Supreme Court, the Court makes itself look like a mysterious cabal that operates beyond the reach of the American public. Since the Court is in fact a mysterious cabal beyond the reach of public accountability, there’s no good reason to deny the people their YouTube clips.

Ain’t s**t we can do about their decisions anyway.

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Cameras in Court Bill Resurfaces [Broadcasting Cable]

Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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