CSotD: Justices must wash hands before ascending bench
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The advantage of political cartooning over gag cartooning is that you don't have to make things up. "Tom the Dancing Bug" only needs to put the news in a funny setting to turn it into humor. In this case, Ruben Bolling simply has the justices speak as if they were perfectly frank about what they're up to.
No need to distort much of anything. While objections to Scalia's apparent conflict of interest were mostly trumpeted on anti-Wal-Mart sites, the topic did come up in the straight press. It wasn't treated as a headline topic, but it was there:
"A group that advocates for Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT) workers said Justice Antonin Scalia should disqualify himself when the U.S. Supreme Court considers the company’s bid to derail a gender-bias suit on behalf of potentially 1 million employees.
"Wal-Mart Watch, a union-funded group that isn’t involved in the case, said recusal was warranted because Scalia’s son Eugene has represented the world’s largest retailer in other cases. Eugene Scalia is co-chairman of the labor and employment practice group at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP, the Los Angeles- based firm representing Wal-Mart in the discrimination case.
"Justices generally don’t disqualify themselves from cases involving a family member’s law firm. Scalia was one of seven justices who in 1993 signed a policy that said they wouldn’t withdraw from a case unless there was some “special factor,” such as a relative’s status as lead counsel." — Bloomberg, March 9, 2011
The immediate argument against recusal is that it would be "too easy to game the system," that companies would purposely hire lawyers with Supreme Court Justice relatives. Sounds to me more like an argument against an inbred justice system where you could do that. But then I'm the kind of humorless puritan outsider who thinks the White House Correspondents Association Dinner is a symptom of a serious malady rather than a light-hearted gathering of colleagues.
The ethical fig leaf, according to this summary of the issue, is that the law firm has agreed to not include payment from Wal-Mart in the compensation Eugene Scalia receives as a partner in the firm.
This seems to me a bit like a religious teetotaller with a part-interest in a restaurant asking to have income from the bar withheld from his share; he is dancing past the ethical question of what the place's overall income would be if it didn't have a liquor license.
Certainly, Wal-Mart knew who Eugene Scalia was when they specifically hired him to protect them against whistleblower legislation six years ago. Whatever he may have had excluded from his income since, he certainly enriched himself and elevated the profile of his firm through Wal-Mart's patronage back then.
When I used to visit high schools and talk to kids about political cartooning, I'd caution them about Thomas Nast's attacks on Boss Tweed, which are covered in most American History courses but generally without a lot of context.
Nast certainly was critical in the takedown of Tweed, but it was not the case that he unearthed the corruption at Tammany Hall. He simply illustrated what others were writing about. There were plenty of big important articles about the graft and deceit, I would tell them, but I would then remind them that it takes an effort to read big important articles and that a lot of people tend to put it off for a "later" that never happens.
Tweed is often quoted on just that point, with variations that suggest he either said it often or that nobody quite got it exact, to the effect that he didn't care what they wrote about him because his constituents didn't read. But, he said, any damn fool can look at pictures.
Well, that's changing. With the decline of print and, at the same time, the decline of political cartooning as part of print editors' chosen weaponry, the "pictures" that the damn fools look at today are the easy images on Fox and MSNBC, a style of partisan hackery that you don't have to be Boss Tweed to decry.
Nast was a partisan, certainly, but his abilities put him well above the level of the simple-minded blow-dried partyliners of cable networks. And I would number Ruben Bolling as one of those cartoonists who is closer to Nast than to Sean Hannity or to the recently reborn and now even more self-infatuated Keith Olbermann.
But he had an inestimable advantage. Harper's Weekly gave Nast a bully pulpit today's cartoonists can only envy, and he used it for cartoons that would not be out of place on the current scene.
The Dead Beat
The Ghost of Jack Turpin to Jack Sheppard. "There's no use talking. To them belongs the palm. They have completely outdone us.
(Turpin and Sheppard were highwaymen of the past, the cultural equivalent of Jesse James or Al Capone. Note that the wastebasket contains "the will of the people," "law" and "arrests." Harper's Weekly, Dec. 23, 1871)
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