At around 12:30 a.m., shortly after my train from New York pulled into Washington’s Union Station, I decided to walk over to the U.S. Supreme Court to check out the scene. Since 6 a.m. on Friday, April 24, dozens of people have been camped outside One First Street, hoping to make it into the courtroom tomorrow morning to witness the historic oral arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges (aka the marriage cases).
As I approached the building by walking along First Street, I was struck anew by the beauty of Cass Gilbert’s Neoclassical structure:
And then I came upon the campers:
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The line stretched down First Street:
And around the corner:
This photo, taken from across the street, gives you a better sense of the size of the camp:
The weather wasn’t bad — no rain or wind, around 50 degrees — and I detected no foul odors coming from the camp. The campers, when interviewed by Chris Geidner of BuzzFeed over the weekend, seemed to be in good spirits.
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But I couldn’t help wondering, as I beheld the untidy sidewalk campsite with the magnificent Supreme Court building in the background, that there has to be a better way for members of the public to see their highest court at work. If you’re an ordinary citizen — not a member of the Supreme Court press corps or bar, not a friend of a justice, not one of The Elect — you might have to camp outside for days to see the proceedings in a high-profile case.
Or, if you can afford it, you can pay someone to endure the pain for you. As Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern recently wrote in Slate:
Starting Friday, if you or your law firm had $6,000 to shell out, a paid proxy — a company such as LineStanding.com or Washington Express — would arrange to have someone hold your place in line. The fact that some of these line-standers appear to be either very poor or homeless and may have to stand in rain, snow, sleet, or hail so that you don’t have to irks at least some people who feel that thousands of dollars shouldn’t be the fee to bear witness to “Equal Justice Under the Law” — the words etched over the door to the Supreme Court building — in action….
Many have argued the process would be more fair, or at least look less like a feudal wedding banquet, if the Supreme Court were to allocate seating based on a lottery. Of course the simplest and fairest solution to this mess would be to allow cameras into the court, but there is not much point in holding out any hope for that. So instead we stand in the rain and wait. Or pay others to do so instead.
Money buying better access to government is nothing new; it’s called lobbying. But that’s what happens across the street in Congress, the icky legislative branch. One would expect the exalted and enlightened judicial branch to take a wiser and fairer approach.
Not All Must Rise [Slate]
Days Before Marriage Arguments, Dozens Wait For A Seat In The Supreme Court [BuzzFeed]