Courts

The Rumors Of Her Demise Were Greatly Fabricated

Fox & Friends made a tiny mistake.

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If you were watching Fox & Friends yesterday morning — and really, what else are you going to do before a day of hijacking a man’s legacy? — you may have noticed that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was dead for a few minutes in the Schrödinger’s Box of right-wing media.

The network apologized a few minutes later, spoiling the morning of delirious speculation from the Fox & Friends faithful trying to identify a new nominee capable of bringing booze-fueled sexual violence to the whole new level worthy of replacing an icon of women’s rights.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQEpE9MpaCs&t=0m18s

In the immediate aftermath, many accused the network of pulling this stunt on purpose, perhaps to rile up their base by reminding them of the stakes in the next presidential election. It’s time to put away the tinfoil hats. Newsrooms are notoriously messy places where mistakes get made all the time.

On the other hand, it’s not like Fox accidentally aired its “Gerald Ford obituary package.” Compare this with the same network’s effort to prematurely kill off Patti LaBelle by showing her picture for Aretha Franklin’s obituary. While embarrassing, that was an instance of a network grabbing the wrong picture on the fly when the occasion presented itself.

But this isn’t a graphic they have buried in the archives, this is an image they appear to have on speed dial — sitting at the fingertips of a producer no farther away than the seven-second delay button. They’re so hard up for this shoe to drop they’re in the midst of a macabre four-year vigil with their death coverage on a hair trigger.

It’s also why we desperately need to adopt a system of term limits for active duty Supreme Court justices. It’s not healthy that the primary way to change the composition of the Court is to watch jurists engage in a protracted chess match with Death that ends in either the ground or retirement to help out your son’s client. This is also why we have to suffer limiting the talent pool of the nation’s premier court to people no older than 55 so the country can be held hostage to the will of presidents who died 30 years ago lest some future two-term president exert more influence by a quirk of actuarial tables.

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When the crybabies at Georgetown demanded a safe space not to hear people criticize Antonin Scalia for presiding over an aggressive decades-long assault on minorities, it was just another side of this coin: when this is the nature of the Court, career post-mortems have to be conducted post-mortem. Still, I have no doubts that Randy Barnett and Nick Rosenkranz understood that and were instead cynically playing up crocodile tears to prevent anyone from pointing out what a substantively vicious and despicable legacy their hero left behind instead of focusing on him being an affable, funny guy who went to the opera with Ginsburg and wrote amusingly biting opinions.

This is all dumb. Supreme Court seats are for life, but sitting on the “active” panel doesn’t have to be. Two justices per presidential term, 18-year terms. Premature departures covered by the “senior status” Court, which also cures the pernicious failure of the Court to have a serious approach to ethics problems as there would be a bench of fully vetted replacements to adjudicate claims in the event of recusal.

But this is America, so I presume we’ll look back on this in 20 years as the halcyon days where we just tribally rooted for peaceful death as opposed to the new reality of a Spy vs. Spy-inspired slapstick murder fest carried out amongst the rival justices at One First Street on a live cable feed.

Just kidding… the Supreme Court would never televise anything.

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HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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