Free Supreme Courtship by Christopher Buckley Page B

wk? Realtor wants to do Open House. Hope u r OK. Love T.
    Not yet ten a.m. on a Wednesday, and the most powerful man in the country wanted a drink. Needed a drink. Maybe if he just drank the entire bottle of Listerine. Mouthwash had alcohol in it, didn’t it?
    His cell vibrated again. A call. Mertz, his clerk, alerting him to a story in today’s
Washington Times
, an interview with Justice Silvio Santamaria, in which he described the Chief Justice’s vote in
Fantods v. Utley
(the gay marriage ruling) as “an abomination.” Mertz hesitated before reading his boss Justice Santamaria’s next comment, about how Justice Hardwether “should consider exchanging his black robe for a more appropriate color. Scarlet might be appropriate.”
    Thanks, Silvio. Damn collegial of you.
    The fact was that the Hardwether Court was a divided court. One-third of the justices had been appointed by conservative presidents; one-third by liberal presidents; and another third by presidents of no consistent ideology. Half the justices had proved to be disappointments to the presidents who appointed them, the conservatives voting liberal and the liberals voting conservative and the middle-of-the-roaders swerving like drunk drivers from right to left. Nine times out of ten, the Court voted 5–4 .
    Consistent razor-thin majorities are not a sign of a happy court—or a happy country. The Court had split 5–4 on affirmative action, right-to-life, right-to-death, gun control, capital punishment, school prayer, partial birth abortion, stem cell research, torture, free speech, border security, interstate commerce, copyright, immigration, pharmaceutical patents, even on a case involving graffiti. A Court that couldn’t agree whether there had been a violation of the First Amendment rights of a seventeen-year-old arrested for spray painting obscene slogans on a pair of Mormon missionaries was not likely to reach consensus on larger issues.
    “It is at this point unclear,” the
Times
noted, “whether this Court could agree on the law of gravity.”
    Personal tensions, long simmering, had begun to bubble to the surface. Some justices had barely addressed a word to each other in years, which made for a frosty atmosphere in conference where they all had to sit at a table and discuss cases and vote. Paige Plympton, the only justice who was on speaking terms with every other justice, did what she could to warm things up, but it was tough going. When she arranged a picnic outing for the justices and their families, two showed up. *
    The Court was in this regard perhaps reflective of the country as a whole. The last presidential election had been decided by four electoral votes and a popular plurality of 14,000 . The majorities in the House and Senate were thinner than slices of deli-cut salami. Even the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, normally not a hotbed of intramural dissent and backbiting, was now the scene of ad hominem remarks, leaks, and even shoving matches. The Yeats line about things falling apart and the center not holding was being quoted so often it had started to turn up on refrigerator magnets in airport gift shops. One pundit had suggested that the Treasury ought to stop printing the words
E pluribus unum
on the nation’s coinage and substitute
Every man for himself.
Even the occasional terrorist attack didn’t seem to bring the country together these days. Within a day or two, everyone was back to squabbling about whose fault it was and who should pay for it.
    Scarlet, huh? You fat pompous Sicilian gasbag,
Hardwether fumed.
    Every court has its diva. Silvio Santamaria, 250 pounds, gel-slicked-back jet-black hair, former boxer, Jesuit seminarian, father of thirteen children, Knight of Malta, adviser to the Vatican on international law and even occasional guest
advocatus diaboli
in canonization cases. * What relish he brought to
that
task! A reproduction of Holbein’s Sir Thomas More hung in his chambers. Indeed, his written