Colbert to Justice Breyer: Why Can the Gov’t Watch Us, but We Can’t Watch SCOTUS?
Stephen Colbert welcomes his first Supreme Court Justice to the Late Show Monday night in the form of President Bill Clinton-appointee Stephen Breyer. Their conversation stayed mostly light and steered clear of specific controversies (though Colbert did make a Kim Davis joke in his intro segment), but things got interesting when the host brought up the ban on cameras in the Court.
“The Supreme Court is about the last place in America where I couldn’t bring my camera crew in to shoot what the government is doing, to get video of what the government is doing,” Colbert said midway through the interview. “Why can’t we watch you if the Supreme Court repeatedly rules that we can be watched by the government?” he asked to applause from the audience.
Breyer admitted there are “very good arguments” on both sides of the issue, but when Colbert joked that the Justice could use the hypothetical cameras to promote his new book, The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities
“I’m in a job where we wear black robes, in part, because we’re speaking for the law,” Breyer said. “Everybody know we’re human beings… but the country doesn’t want to know the Constitution according to Breyer or according to O’Connor — they want to know what the answer to this thing is. That’s true of the process.”
Because, as Breyer explained, “the oral argument is about 5 percent of the basis for deciding a case” — with the other 95 percent based on writing — he believes the American people would get a skewed view of the process. “Human beings, correctly and decently, relate to people they see, and they’ll see two lawyers and they’ll see two clients,” he added. “Will they understand the whole story? Will they understand what we’re doing? Will there be distortions? Now that’s the arguments against you. The argument for you is that it would be a fabulous educational process.”
“And pretty entertaining sometimes, too,” Colbert said.
The two men agreed to disagree on that point.
Watch video below, via CBS:
[Photo via screengrab]
— —
