The Oath: The Obama White House and The Supreme Court - Softcover

Toobin, Jeffrey

 
9780307390714: The Oath: The Obama White House and The Supreme Court
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307390713 ISBN 13: 9780307390714
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction

From the moment Chief Justice Roberts botched Barack Obama's oath of office, the relationship between the Court and the White House has been a fraught one. Grappling with issues as diverse as campaign finance, abortion, and the right to bear arms, the Roberts court has put itself squarely at the center of American political life. Jeffrey Toobin brilliantly portrays key personalities and cases and shows how the President was fatally slow to realize the importance of the judicial branch to his agenda. Combining incisive legal analysis with riveting insider details, The Oath is an essential guide to understanding the Supreme Court of our interesting times.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeffrey Toobin is the bestselling author of The Nine, Too Close to Call, A Vast Conspiracy, and The Run of His Life. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the senior legal analyst at CNN. He lives with his family in New York.

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Excerpted from the Hardcover Edition



1. The Politician’s Path

On February 14, 2008, a man named Steven Kazmierczak opened fire on the campus of Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb, Illinois. He killed five people, and injured twenty-one, before committing suicide. The following day, Barack Obama, the junior senator from the state and a candidate for president, was asked about the shooting at a news conference. In light of this tragedy, what did Obama think about the need for gun control, especially as it related to the Second Amendment?

The Second Amendment states: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” There was and remains unanimous agreement that the text of the amendment is ungrammatical. For more than a century, there was also agreement on what the Second Amendment meant. According to this understanding, the Second Amendment related only to the rights of citizen militias and imposed no barrier to gun control; in other words, the amendment did not give private individuals a right to bear arms.

Obama had a different view.

“I believe that the Second Amendment means something. I do think it speaks to an individual right,” Obama said at his news conference following the massacre. “There’s been a long-standing argument among constitutional scholars about whether the Second Amendment referred simply to militias or whether it spoke to an individual right to possess arms. I think the latter is the better argument,” he went on. “There is an individual right to bear arms, but it is subject to common-sense regulation just like most of our rights are subject to common-sense regulation. And so I think there’s a lot of room before you start bumping up against a constitutional barrier.”

Even a few years earlier, Obama’s comments would have seemed bizarre. Since a Supreme Court case called United States v. Miller, in 1939, hundreds of courts had rejected the individual rights view of the Second Amendment. But then the National Rifle Association, the Republican Party, and their allies invested their time, money, and energy in creating a new understanding of the Second Amendment. Indeed, at the time of Obama’s news conference about the massacre, the Supreme Court was preparing to decide District of Columbia v. Heller, a product of this long effort to create a new interpretation of the Second Amendment. The work of conservatives to change the accepted meaning of the framers’ words was so successful that the recruits to the cause came to include the Chicago liberal who was a leading contender to be the Democratic nominee for president.

This, it turns out, was no surprise. Obama was an unusually well-credentialed lawyer. His life as a public figure began in 1990, when he was twenty-eight and won election as president of the Harvard Law Review, the first African American to hold that position. Obama practiced law for a dozen years and taught at the University of Chicago Law School for nearly as long. But by the time he ran for president, Obama was above all a politician, and a cautious one. Obama admired the heroes of the civil rights movement, including the lawyers, but he did not model his career on theirs. Obama did not believe the courts were the principal vehicle for social and political change. Elections, rather than lawsuits, were his battlefield of choice, and by 2008 he knew that the way to win the presidency was, in part, to embrace the individual rights theory of the Second Amendment.

Near the end of his memoir, Dreams from My Father, which he published when he was thirty-three, Obama reflected on his education at Harvard Law School. His tone was ambivalent. “The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power—and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition.” Then, in a gesture that was common in the book, and in Obama’s character, he gave the other side of the story: “But that is not all the law is,” he continued. “The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.”

Obama’s conversation with himself continued: “How far do our obligations reach? How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love? The answers I find in law books don’t always satisfy me—for every Brown v. Board of Education I find a score of cases where conscience is sacrificed to expedience or greed.” As before, though, Obama followed that despairing remark with a hopeful one: “And yet, in the conversation itself, in the joining of voices, I find myself modestly encouraged, believing that so long as the questions are still being asked, what binds us together might somehow, ultimately, prevail.”

Obama arrived at Harvard after spending three years as a community organizer in Chicago. There he had led a small group in a series of fights, usually with the city government, for better housing, for asbestos abatement, and for jobs on the South Side. Like many such endeavors to organize the poor, Obama’s work was difficult and not especially successful; friends and colleagues found Obama more analytical than confrontational. In time, as his frustrations mounted, Obama began thinking about going to law school. Partly, Obama simply wanted to find a way to make a decent living, but the profession also seemed well suited to his particular kind of intelligence and ambitions. He was admitted to Harvard and began his studies in the fall of 1988.

Obama had just turned twenty-seven, which turned out to be a fact of some significance. Most of his fellow students were considerably younger, and Obama’s maturity, both chronological and temperamental, set him apart. He approached law school, as he did much else, with a certain detachment, as both participant and observer. Law school, and Harvard in particular, would leave its mark on Obama, but his core remained unchanged.

There was much truth in the conventional view of a Harvard Law School degree as a passport to Wall Street law firms, but the school also produced eminent role models for an aspiring reformer like Obama. Louis Brandeis, class of 1877, practically invented Supreme Court litigation as a vehicle for social change and, in an article in the Harvard Law Review, first identified a “right to privacy.” Felix Frankfurter, class of 1906, provided much of the intellectual energy behind the New Deal, as well as many protégés to Franklin Roosevelt, before following Brandeis on to the Supreme Court. Archibald Cox, class of 1937, joined the faculty and went on to serve as President Kennedy’s solicitor general and then Watergate special prosecutor. In subsequent decades, untold numbers of Harvard Law graduates moved to Washington, and around the country, to make their marks on the policies of the day.

And there was a time, too, when ideas, as well as people, also made the trip from the Ivy League to Washington. In the Warren Court years—the years of Brown—leading law schools provided much of the intellectual firepower behind the Court’s most liberal decisions. In Goldberg v. Kelly, in 1970, the Court held for the first time that the government must give an individual a hearing before cutting off his welfare benefits. To do otherwise, Justice William J. Brennan Jr. said, would...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307390713
ISBN 13 
9780307390714
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
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preigu
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