We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have a Senate in which, as a study by the political scientist Larry Bartels reveals, “Senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes.” We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have the Roberts Court that consistently privileges the donor class. Later on, this process of corruption spread in the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of emperors.” “The abuse of buying and selling votes,” he wrote of Rome, “crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. The historian Plutarch warned us long ago of what happens when there is no brake on the power of great wealth to subvert the electorate. The Donor Class and Streams of Dark Money He smiled and said, “Look, pal, we’ve always known - the Framers knew - that liberty is a fragile thing. Toward the end of his tenure, when he was writing an increasing number of dissents on the Rehnquist Court, Brennan was asked if he was getting discouraged. Until then, I had no idea that he and the other teachers would have lost everything if the case had gone the other way.” The journalist Nat Hentoff, who followed Brennan’s work closely, wrote, “He may have seen hardly any of the litigants before him, but he searched for a sense of them in the cases that reached him.” Watching the interview with Keyishian, he said, “It was the first time I had seen him. Justice Brennan watched that program and was fascinated to see the actual person behind the name on his decision. I tracked Keyishian down and interviewed him. Justice Brennan ruled that the loyalty oath and other anti-subversive state statutes of that era violated First Amendment protections of academic freedom. It involved a teacher named Harry Keyishian who had been fired because he would not sign a New York State loyalty oath. Another concerned a case he had heard back in 1967. My interview with him was one of 12 episodes in that series on the Constitution. How I wish he were here now - and still on the Court! That was long before the era of cyberspace and the maximum surveillance state that grows topsy-turvy with every administration. Science has done things that, as I understand it, makes it possible through these drapes and those windows to get something in here that takes down what we’re talking about.” When he mentioned that modern science might be creating “a Frankenstein,” I asked, “How so?” He looked around his chambers and replied, “The very conversation we’re now having can be overheard. He did, however, subsequently reveal that his own mother told him she had always liked his opinions when he was on the New Jersey court, but wondered now that he was on the Supreme Court, “Why can’t you do it the same way?” His answer: “We have to discharge our responsibility to enforce the rights in favor of minorities, whatever the majority reaction may be.”Īlthough a liberal, he worried about the looming size of government. He claimed that he never took personally the resentment and anger directed at him. Those decisions brought a storm of protest from across the country. Sullivan in particular - the defense of a free press. By then, he had served on the court longer than any of his colleagues and had written close to 500 majority opinions, many of them addressing fundamental questions of equality, voting rights, school segregation, and - in New York Times v. I met Supreme Court Justice William Brennan in 1987 when I was creating a series for public television called InSearchoftheConstitution, celebrating the bicentennial of our founding document. He deliveredtheseremarks (slightlyadaptedhere) attheannualLegacyAwardsdinnerofthe Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisanpublicpolicyinstitutein New YorkCitythatfocusesonvotingrights, moneyinpolitics, equaljustice, andother seminal issuesofdemocracy. BillMoyers: TheGreatAmericanClassWar, PlutocracyVersusDemocracyīyBillMoyers, hostoftheweeklypublictelevision series Moyers & Company andwinnerofnumerousawardsoverhis 40 yearsin broadcast journalism.
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