The Claims of the Court

The canons of academic discourse truly need looking into—by an ecumenical council or something. I have in front of me a book a) written by an éminent professor of government (Mr. Hyneman was recently president of the American Political Science Association) who holds a surer grasp of constitutional law than most specialists in the subject; b) addressed to the gravest problem in contemporary American politics: the Supreme Court’s reach for total power; c) replete with incisive, explosive insights that open up the problem at its core; yet d) so inhibited by the mode of Objectivity and Modulation that the incisions hardly ever spill blood and the anticipated explosions almost never go off; and the reader finds himself recalling William Schlamm’s remark about people who never light up a Camel for fear of offending Lucky Strikes. Indeed, if before starting in I had noticed the jacket’s fatuous blurb— “The Supreme Court on Trial neither attacks nor defends the Supreme Court; it is an analysis, not an indictment . . .”—I would have returned the volume to your book editor, with a match.

The gravity of the problem about the Supreme Court can be measured, if I correctly understand Hyneman, by bringing into line two coordinates. First, there is the claim about the effect an interpretation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court has on other public authorities. The claim, though a cornerstone of Establishment teaching since the Brown decision, was first formally advanced by the Court itself in Cooper v. Aaron, the Little Rock school case, in 1958. Marbury v. Madison, the Warren court said on that occasion, declared the basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution [not so, according to Hyneman], and that principle has ever since been respected by this Court and the Country [again, Hyneman disagrees]. It follows that the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment enunciated by this Court in the Brown case is the supreme law of the land, and Article VI of the Constitution makes it of binding effect on the States. . .

LB

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L. Brent Bozell Jr.

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The canons of academic discourse truly need looking into—by an ecumenical council or something. I have in front of me a book a) written by an éminent professor of government (Mr. Hyneman was recently president of the American Political Science Association) who holds a surer grasp of constitutional law than most specialists in the subject; b) addressed to the gravest problem in contemporary American politics: the Supreme Court’s reach for total power; c) replete with incisive, explosive insights that open up the problem at its core; yet d) so inhibited by the mode of Objectivity and Modulation that the incisions hardly ever spill blood and the anticipated explosions almost never go off; and the reader finds himself recalling William Schlamm’s remark about people who never light up a Camel for fear of offending Lucky Strikes. Indeed, if before starting in I had noticed the jacket’s fatuous blurb— “The Supreme Court on Trial neither attacks nor defends the Supreme Court; it is an analysis, not an indictment . . .”—I would have returned the volume to your book editor, with a match.

The gravity of the problem about the Supreme Court can be measured, if I correctly understand Hyneman, by bringing into line two coordinates. First, there is the claim about the effect an interpretation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court has on other public authorities. The claim, though a cornerstone of Establishment teaching since the Brown decision, was first formally advanced by the Court itself in Cooper v. Aaron, the Little Rock school case, in 1958. Marbury v. Madison, the Warren court said on that occasion, declared the basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution [not so, according to Hyneman], and that principle has ever since been respected by this Court and the Country [again, Hyneman disagrees]. It follows that the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment enunciated by this Court in the Brown case is the supreme law of the land, and Article VI of the Constitution makes it of binding effect on the States. . .