Buffalo News Book Club
Supreme Secrets: 'The Nine' on the court
The nation's high court plays a powerful role in our daily lives, but little is known about its nine members
Like the Greek gods on Mount Olympus, judges of the U.S. Supreme Court work out of sight of ordinary people, sending decisions out of their chambers to shape the lives of all Americans.
Their acts create shock waves more powerful than any thunderbolt. The seven men and two women of the court decide how your employer can treat you, whether women can legally terminate pregnancies, and how far police officers can coerce arrested citizens.
The U.S. Supreme Court's decisions are also felt around the planet, as in 2000, when the court chose a president.
In "The Nine," The Buffalo News' September Book of the Month, CNN legal analyst and author Jeffrey Toobin endeavors to give readers a glimpse behind the curtain. With his engaging writing style, Toobin presents nuggets of insight gleaned from off-the-record interviews with justices and more than 75 of their clerks.
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
By Jeffrey Toobin
Anchor Books
452 pages, $15.95
We learn personal minutia that help flesh out the judges' well-known public credentials. David Souter, a lifelong bachelor who essentially lives a hermit's life in New Hampshire between terms, works with the lights off in his office, and eats an identical lunch every day: "An entire apple, including the core and seeds, with a cup of yogurt."
Clarence Thomas, perhaps the court's most conservative member, isn't worried about what spectators think. During the court's 2007 schedule, Thomas took the bench for 104 oral arguments. Questions asked? Zero.
The quirky details are not as plentiful as some might hope, making "The Nine" more useful as an opinionated primer on the modern U.S. Supreme Court. Toobin's book covers the period from 1972 to 2007, when the court's philosophical makeup changed from liberal to conservative leaning, especially with President George Bush's appointments of Justice Samuel Alito Jr. and Chief Justice John Roberts.
One of the most important episodes that changed the legal landscape of the modern high court, Toobin writes, was the retirement of a key moderate voice, Sandra Day O'Connor. Selected in 1981 by President Reagan, the "thoroughly obscure" O'Connor became not only the first woman justice, but a player, the swing vote on many 5-4 decisions.
In 1992, when the court rejected a Pennsylvania law that would have restricted abortion rights, O'Connor wrote part of the opinion tearing up the reasoning of a lower federal court that supported the law. The decision, coming after President George Bush Sr. appointed Souter and Thomas to the court, signaled that Roe vs. Wade was safe for now.
In 2005, when O'Connor decided to retire due to her husband's advancing Alzheimer's disease, conservative activists successfully backed as her replacement the same judge who had penned the Pennsylvania abortion law opinion that O'Connor had eviscerated in 1992: Samuel Alito.
The Alito nomination, as explored in "The Nine," serves as a main exhibit in Toobin's treatise on how American conservatives became more active, prepared and energetic than their liberal counterparts influencing choices to fill vacancies on the Supreme Court. The conservative wing of the Republican Party even faced down President George W. Bush himself after the president nominated White House counsel Harriet Miers to join the Supreme Court, Toobin says. After the conservative establishment weighed in, the president let Miers withdraw swiftly.
How could the White House make such a mistake? Toobin suggests the president's inner circle was surprised by the furor over his underqualified appointee because "all of the top officials who were considering Miers' appointment — Bush, [Vice President Dick] Cheney, [Chief of staff Andrew] Card, [Karl] Rove and Miers herself — had relatively little idea what Supreme Court justices actually do all day."
In his book, Toobin credits O'Connor with "an uncanny ear for American public opinion," adding that no justice "ever pursued centrism and moderation, those passionless creeds, with greater passion than O'Connor."
Such glowing words from Toobin's pen highlight an issue with books like "The Nine." Since its revelations are built on anonymous sources, readers have to decide how much weight to put on individual stories. Are the justices who come off well, like O'Connor, really that terrific? How much of that glow is due to Toobin's gratitude for the justice trusting him enough to talk to him? It falls to individual readers to decide how much trust Toobin's narrative deserves.
What remains beyond dispute is that Toobin has crafted an approachable, relatively digestible introduction to the personalities and culture of the highest court in the land. Despite what some idealists would like to imagine, Toobin suggests, the personal ideologies of individual justices are too important to ignore.
In the end, he writes, Americans get "the Court we deserve."
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