9/07/00 10:55 a.m.
I Want My Court TV
An end to the judicial oligarchy.

By John J. Miller, NR's national political reporter

ederal judges are fighting a losing battle in attempting to keep television cameras out of their courtrooms, and conservatives ought to cheer them on to defeat. Perhaps nothing made this so clear as a statement offered into Senate testimony on Wednesday by Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican who heads the Judiciary Committee.

Hatch opposes a bipartisan bill that would open the doors of the federal courts to photographs, electronic recordings, and broadcasts. He didn't attend Wednesday's hearing, but he did offer written remarks for the record, including this curious point: "The televising of trials would raise the public profile of judges." This, keep in mind, is one of Hatch's arguments against the bill. (Maybe he thinks it would get in the way of confirming Clinton nominees.)

Yet raising the public profile of judges actually happens to be one of the best arguments in favor of S. 721 (which Hatch mistakenly calls S. 271 in his statement — seven times). As my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru recently pointed out in NR, the Supreme Court — and by extension, all the federal courts — is veering toward oligarchic rule. Nothing sums this up as succinctly as the high court's own words in the 1992 Casey decision, in which a pro-abortion majority of justices urged "the contending sides of a national controversy to end their national division" over what is probably the most impassioned debate in American politics. In other words: We have ruled, now shut up.

If there was ever a branch of government that cried out for more scrutiny, this is it.

Yet scrutiny is an argument the opponents of courtroom cameras like to use; they say cameras would ratchet-up scrutiny to the point where nerve-wracked witnesses would become unreliable and defendants would lose necessary protections. But the courts are already high-stakes venues for these participants. The people who don't face enough scrutiny now are the judges themselves. They're afraid a viewing public might second-guess their decisions.

The thing is, it's about time the public did.

The Senate bill, sponsored by Charles Grassley (R., Ia.) and Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) would be like C-SPAN for the federal courts. And it's power wouldn't be absolute — presiding judges would have the authority to order the cameras out, witnesses who need special protections wouldn't need to show their faces, and so on. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.), a supporter, even suggested the current proposal doesn't go far enough; he said on Wednesday that he's writing a bill to force cameras into the Supreme Court. (The House has already passed a fatally weakened version of Grassley-Schumer — it stipulates that both the defendant and the prosecution agree to the presence of cameras.)

The court systems in 47 states currently permit cameras, as do the Second and the Ninth Circuits — and there doesn't seem to be a clamor from any of the places to unplug them. Courtroom cameras are an experiment that has worked. Now they should come to the whole federal court system.