{"id":512,"date":"2009-01-20T23:30:34","date_gmt":"2009-01-21T04:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/?p=512"},"modified":"2009-01-20T23:32:29","modified_gmt":"2009-01-21T04:32:29","slug":"she-sells-seashells-by-the-seashore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/2009\/01\/20\/she-sells-seashells-by-the-seashore\/","title":{"rendered":"She Sells Seashells, By the Seashore!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Okay, so you’re the Chief Justice of the United States of America.\u00a0 You have a sweet job.\u00a0 You’ve got a nifty black robe, an excellent seat for the festivities, and exactly one function to discharge for the entire day.\u00a0 That function consists of correctly reciting\u00a0thirty-five extremely well-known words:\u00a0 the Oath of Office for the President of the United States.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, some people are nervous speaking in public.\u00a0 If that’s you, and you’re the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, don’t worry.\u00a0 You can take comfort in the fact that 35 words isn’t really that much to remember.\u00a0 To put it in perspective, every\u00a0barfly in every\u00a0tavern in the world\u00a0can belt out the\u00a0entire first verse of Stairway to Heaven<\/em>, \u00a0all 48 words of it,\u00a0verbatim.\u00a0 Even with a full-on snootful of loudmouth soup.\u00a0 So\u00a0thirty-five words isn’t really that much.\u00a0 Thirty-five words is definitely manageable, right?\u00a0 Hell, you might not even be that hammered\u00a0when you have to recite those words to the incoming President.<\/p>\n

The big moment arrives, and you stand up on the stage in front of a live audience of a million or more people.\u00a0 Billions more are watching by television throughout the world.\u00a0 Here is what you do:\u00a0\u00a0incredibly, your mind starts to wander while you’re in the middle of discharging this simple little task.\u00a0 It’s hard to say how\u00a0 <\/em>exactly these things happen.\u00a0 Perhaps you’re daydreaming about\u00a0the day not so long ago that the New Guy had this to say\u00a0when he voted against giving you that sweet job<\/a> and the nifty robe:<\/p>\n

The bottom line is this: I will be voting against John Roberts\u2019 nomination. I do so with considerable reticence. I hope that I am wrong. I hope that this reticence on my part proves unjustified and that Judge Roberts will show himself to not only be an outstanding legal thinker but also someone who upholds the Court\u2019s historic role as a check on the majoritarian impulses of the executive branch and the legislative branch.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Maybe you’re a little choked about your buddy W. and his puppetmaster heading out of town for good;\u00a0 nobody to really relive the good times with, y’know?\u00a0 Maybe you just got a little too wrapped up in clicking off some snapshots of the whole shindig with your point-and-shoot digital camera (jeez guys, I thought we were all<\/em>\u00a0 bringing cameras on to the podium – was it really noticeable that I was doing that?)\u00a0 Anyway\u00a0\u00a0 somehow, not fifteen words into the thing, you find your gums flapping away as if by themselves.\u00a0 Strangely, your\u00a0renegade mouth has\u00a0the President “to” the United States (instead of “of”) and that good ‘ol adverb “faithfully” seems to have very capriciously wandered off by itself near the end of an increasingly puzzling and unfamiliar sentence.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Something’s not right.\u00a0 The New Guy – slick orator, smart guy, never seems to lose the thread of what he’s saying – is looking back at you, right hand raised, left hand on the Lincoln Bible.\u00a0 He has that “seriously, that’s the best you can do?” look on his face, and you are suddenly aware<\/em> that you have, as the New Guy\u00a0is so fond of saying, “at this moment” and “in this place”, shat the bed.\u00a0 You back up ten and punt;\u00a0 repeat the last sentence one more time with feeling and think to yourself, “do you suppose that next time I should write this fucking thing down in advance?”<\/p>\n

The New Guy then takes the podium and rips off an eighteen-minute\u00a0inaugural address without even once\u00a0losing the flow\u00a0of his moving and inspirational words.\u00a0\u00a0 Dude just totally made you look like an idiot.\u00a0 A drooling fucking idiot.\u00a0 You can hear your brother judges laughing their asses off in chambers, pounding their knees in spasms of hilarity:\u00a0 seriously, eighteen minutes?\u00a0 And you screwed up thirty-five pre-ordained words?<\/p>\n

When the ceremony is done and\u00a0you’re putting your nifty black robe\u00a0away in the\u00a0garment bag, you pause to explain –\u00a0for the eighty-seventh time in about a half an hour\u00a0– to one of the many mucky-mucks in attendance just exactly what happened up there.\u00a0 You both laugh about it, but everyone who comes up to you has that look in their eyes;\u00a0\u00a0all of you know that you crapped the bed earlier today and incredibly, you all try to pretend that no one really noticed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then you head back to your judicial office, sit down at your desk and wait for the first chance to express your opinion – your judicial opinion, that is –\u00a0about the New Guy and his policies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Okay, so you’re the Chief Justice of the United States of America. You have a sweet job. You’ve got a nifty black robe, an excellent seat for the festivities, and exactly one function to discharge for the entire day. That function consists of correctly reciting thirty-five extremely well-known words: the Oath of Office for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[1206,651,653,652,654],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=512"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":514,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512\/revisions\/514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}