[lbo-talk] History of Supreme Court cronyism

[andie nachgeborenen]

Interestingly the accomplishments of the named cronies
show a bipolar distribution: Sherman Minton and Tom
Clark (Truman) were nonentities, while Hayes chose the
long forgotten Stanley Mathews and the still revered
(first) John Marshall Harlan, whose dissent in Plessy
v. Ferguson (blessing Jim Crow) was courageous and
prophetic.  Roger Taney, a Jackson crony, is notorious
for his appalling racist opinion in Dred Scott v.
Sanford, but is generally considered to have ben an
excellent Chief Justice up till then.  No one ever
denied that Lincoln's pal David David was a fine
judge, or disputed Johnson crony Abe Fortas's
qualifications -- just his ideology and (in the end)
his ethics. I'm not sure the William Douglas counts as
an FDR crony -- it's not like they palled around or
anything, I think --  but the consenus is that froma 
technical point of views he was not a very good judge.
(Politically he was great, of course.) 

I was surprised to hear that Roscoe Conkling, one of
the great crooks and kleptocrats of the Gilded Age,
had been nominated to the Court. (By Arthur,a  googoo
type! no less)  Conkling is not the person of whom it
was said, when askerd if he was honest, that he
wouldn't steal a red-hot stove (Thaddeus Stevens on
Simon Cameron, a Lincoln cabinet member), but it might
have been said about him. Probably Conkling turned
down the job because it offered so few opportunities
for the exercise of his peculiar talents

--- Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:


> 
> Kinda interesting:
> 
> http://www.slate.com/id/2127493/
> 
> Michael
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