A reader reminds Greg P:
I enjoy your blog. In regards to your post “the Palin Double Standard” (others have probably noted this too) but actually we are not still waiting for Reid’s example. The WSJ’s James Taranto highlighted Reid’s example below on January 3, 2005 in the Best of the Web, excerpted below:
When Congress reconvenes tomorrow, Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada is set to become the leader of the Senate Democrats. Readers of this column will recall that last month we criticized Reid for calling Justice Clarence Thomas an “embarrassment” and saying Thomas’s opinions are “poorly written,” in contrast with those of the brilliant Antonin Scalia. We noted that Reid hadn’t given an example of a poorly written Thomas opinion, and wondered if Reid’s statement didn’t amount to simple bigotry: stereotyping Thomas as unintelligent because he is black. An alert reader points out that on the Dec. 26 episode of “Inside Politics,” a little-watched CNN show, Reid actually did name such an opinion, at the request of host Ed Henry (we’ve corrected several obvious transcription errors here):
Henry: When you were asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether or not you could support Justice Thomas to be chief justice you said quote, “I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written.” Could you name one of those opinions that you think is poorly written?
Reid: Oh sure, that’s easy to do. You take the Hillside Dairy case. In that case you had a dissent written by Scalia and a dissent written by Thomas. There–it’s like looking at an eighth-grade dissertation compared to somebody who just graduated from Harvard. Scalia’s is well reasoned. He doesn’t want to turn stare decisis precedent on its head. That’s what Thomas wants to do. So yes, I think he has written a very poor opinion there and he’s written other opinions that are not very good.
It’s interesting to learn that in Nevada eighth-graders write dissertations; we guess that explains how Harry Reid got to be as erudite as he is. He must immerse himself deeply in legal scholarship to be familiar with a case like Hillside Dairy v. Lyons, which doesn’t exactly rank up there with Marbury v. Madison, Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade among famous Supreme court rulings. To be honest, we’d never even heard of Hillside Dairy until we read the CNN transcript, so we went and looked it up. It turns out to be a 2003 case about California milk regulation. Here is Thomas’s opinion in full:
I join Parts I and III of the Court’s opinion and respectfully dissent from Part II, which holds that §144 of the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996, 7 U.S.C. §7254, “does not clearly express an intent to insulate California’s pricing and pooling laws from a Commerce Clause challenge.” Ante, at 6-7. Although I agree that the Court of Appeals erred in its statutory analysis, I nevertheless would affirm its judgment on this claim because “[t]he negative Commerce Clause has no basis in the text of the Constitution, makes little sense, and has proved virtually unworkable in application,” Camps Newfound/Owatonna, Inc. v. Town of Harrison, 520 U.S. 564, 610 (1997) (Thomas, J., dissenting), and, consequently, cannot serve as a basis for striking down a state statute.
Is that written at an eighth-grade level? We report, you decide. What about that Scalia dissent Reid found so impressive that he thought it worthy of a recent Harvard undergrad (rather a backhanded compliment, since Scalia actually graduated from Harvard Law School 45 years ago)? Here it is, quoted also in its entirety: ” ” That’s right, there was no Scalia dissent. Scalia joined the court’s majority opinion, written by Justice John Paul Stevens, as did every other justice except Thomas, and he dissented only from Part II.
Another reader, noting this, adds:
Reid, being Reid, managed to botch even this rehearsed answer.