People Who Work at TNR May Have Extra Chromosomes

According to anonymous sources, Jeffrey Rosen may have Downs Syndrome. I haven't talked to enough of them to have any idea whether he, in fact, has Downs Syndrome, nor have I done any research to address the question, but I'm pretty sure it merits a couple thousand words at five cents each. Please make your check payable to cash, thanks.

While I think it's appropriate for people to pile on to this guy for being a douchebag and crypto-bigot, I have to wonder whether he would have a point if you conceded it. Namely, the Supreme Court is about power, and Clarence Thomas' moronic silence has just as much of a vote as Scalia's prickish eloquence.

I think there's an idea, perhaps put into our collective heads by an episode of West Wing, that a Justice can write a dissenting opinion or a nuanced concurrence that is so brilliant and forceful that thinkers for decades will have to reckon with its power. I have definitely read two such opinions as a law student that I'll mention here.

The first is McCleskey v. Kemp, a death penalty case where the court said, just because 80% of the people executed in the State of Georgia are black, and they're 5x as likely to be executed if they kill a white person than another black person, doesn't mean the death penalty is a violation of equal protection as it is administred. Garbage. Justice Stevens wrote an inspired dissent, and you know what? 25 years later, not a damn thing has changed.

The second is Eldred v. Ashcroft, a copyright case that said the phrase "limited times" in the Constitution's IP clause just means any duration less than infinity, so it's perfectly okay if Disney pays Congress to give them 170 year copyrights. Justice Breyer, standing alone, pointed out that the present value of that 170th year is approximately nil, and the loss to society from preventing these works from entering the public domain is significant, and we should read some teeth into these words. But even if his dissent is adopted into law 20 years down the road, what is the present value of the positive social change it creates? Right.

I guess what I'm saying is, I think progressives should be concerned first with having a reliable vote on issues that matter: executive privilege, search and seizure in the face of new technology, equal protection, and reproductive freedom. To the extent politics are an issue, people should be concerned that getting that person confirmed is successful. If her personal story makes it that much easier, then great.