SCOTUS: A Big Deal Now, Ignored In 2008
Woo-hoo! Elena Kagan is everywhere! It’s Kaganfest 2010! She’s totally debatable as a Supreme Court nominee! She knows Eliot Spitzer! She’s better for a headline than Taylor Momsen! Everybody loves the Supreme Court!
That is…now. But if you think back to the 2008 campaign, you’ll realize that this whole caring-about-the-Supreme-Court thing was sorta absent. Bush had appointed Justices Roberts and Alito, and swung the court decisively to the right. Whoever became president would have the chance to do the same. Conventional wisdom was that the next president would probably appoint two or three new judges, changing the face of the court significantly in the short term, with significant ramifications for the long term.
Right now we can all agree: That’s a huge, big deal. But back then, you could not have gotten anyone to care about it if you’d written it in lipstick on a pig. From my recent piece on AOL News:
I wondered about that in the spring of ’08, when McCain quietly made a speech vaguely against “activist judges” but filled with code words strategically aimed for the right wing. I wondered about that in the summer when Sarah Palin was sprung on an unsuspecting world as the Republican vice-presidential nominee and a pro-life icon. And I wondered about it in the fall when Katie Couric flummoxed Palin by asking her to name a specific Supreme Court case with which she disagreed. (She couldn’t.)
While there was nonstop coverage of Palin (which actually hasn’t stopped since), the discussion never veered into questions of how Roe v. Wade could be overturned by a McCain court or even why specific Supreme Court cases might be important. Even when Dahlia Lithwick — a top thinker and go-to on all things SCOTUS — got a Newsweek cover out of it in September ’08, it was less about the court than a tart essay about Sarah Palin (with a sexy-lipstick-themed cover, no less).
It’s not that Lithwick wasn’t writing about the court — that’s her specialty. It’s that outside of that specialty, it just wasn’t a hot topic.
And amazingly, it wasn’t. Jeffrey Toobin had told me in May 2008 that overturning Roe v. Wade, would “not take long if there is another Republican appointee.” But nobody seemed to care. I mean, yes, there were a few articles, obviously, but – we all know the difference. Proportionally, the Court got very little ink. Take a look at Politico’s archives from that time, or even Glenn Greenwald‘s – there, if you looked for it, but just not the focus.
But when it comes to buzz about the 2008 election, there is only one arbiter that matters: Game Change, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. There, in the index, was the answer, under “Suprme Court, U.S.”: Four references. I checked them. Three were about how Steve Schmidt had formerly worked on the Roberts and Alito confirmations; one was about Katie Couric’s question to Sarah Palin. “Rezko, Tony” got eight. It’s official: No one cared about the Supreme Court during the 2008 election.
But they do now! So sharpen thee your Kagan headlines. The Supreme Court matters. Maybe it’ll even matter in 2012, too.
Oh sure, NOW you care about the Supreme Court! [AOL News]
Sunday Show Highlights: A Whole Lot Of Kagan Going On [Mediaite]
Related:
Toobin: A McCain Court Could Overturn Roe In “Maybe A Year” [ETP, May 2008]
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
