“We was robbed!”  Remember the last time you heard that in some athletic contest? Our experience in the Olympics over the last half century showed us that if the judges came from different countries, our heroes and heroines did not do quite as well as the local product.  We ALL remember vividly how the Supremes tainted the 2000 Election by stopping the counting process in favor of fairness to the Republicans.  I don’t suppose you remember the brief submitted to the court using that language.  I do and, WE WAS ROBBED!  It CAN happen again.

A crucial problem lies in the background of this election being wordily over-involved with the character and faith of the two front runners.  That problem is in the courts of the U.S.A. with aging judges whose retirements are sure to come as the superannuated members of that court are waiting for the election to be over so as to give the winner the choice of determining the future of the country in the court system. It is a peculiarity of our system that the courts have so much power due to decisions made at the start of our national period. Judicial Review is firmly established but public opinion, if strong and on the verge of violence, is pronounced and unavoidable; the Courts can and often are responsive.

What is troubling me is that two darlings of the Right, Thomas and Scalia, are young and should remain in a tiny minority when the new appointments settle out. These guys are throwbacks and blind to democratic realities.  As our country and its current leader try to spread our kind of democracy to toppled nations what can we say about foreign court systems that are responsive to populations that do not share the Western notions we believe are true?  We can say that we think that the subjugation of women in those lands will not change unless the changes are more fundamental than showing up at voting booths.  It is clear that the ideas of Thomas and Scalia are not much different than those in countries where women are truly a second sex without hope of rising to equality with men.

I think about judging a lot since I held that position in classrooms across the levels of the educational process.  I judged the performance and promise of students and found myself wondering about my qualifications to do so. There were a few moments in my educational preparation where I thought that a few teachers and professors were from a different planet until I realized that I was the extra-terrestrial.  My ideas and enthusiasms were not in the mainstream and I was saved by the grace of experiencing a few teachers who saw within me something worth saving.  I was being judged not by equals but by decent human beings in the mainstream of our American experience – unlike the Thomas’s and the Scalia’s in the Court today. I loved education and can see where many were turned off.