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kpete

(71,900 posts)
Tue Dec 9, 2014, 11:50 AM Dec 2014

RIGGING THE WHEEL: MORE TRUE TALES OF THE NEW OLIGARCHY - By Charles P. Pierce

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In all parts of our politics, the compass of acceptable ideas gets more tightly circumscribed by the money power. In all parts of our politics, the number of people on whose behalf the government works gets more tightly circumscribed by the money power. In all parts of our politics, the number of people that the government recognizes at all gets more tightly circumscribed. Increasingly, in all parts of our politics, and within the institutions of government, as the redoubtable Driftglass always reminds us, there is a club and you're not in it.

As a consequence, individuals seeking to challenge large companies are left to seek counsel from a pool of attorneys that's smaller and, collectively, less successful. The court generally has a conservative, pro-business majority, but even one of its most liberal justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, accepts the corporate tilt of the specialist bar that dominates the docket."Business can pay for the best counsel money can buy. The average citizen cannot," Ginsburg said. "That's just a reality."

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Michael Luttig, general counsel for aerospace giant Boeing Co., understands the advantages of hiring from that group; he has done so when the company has had a case before the justices. But as a former U.S. appeals court judge who earlier served as a Supreme Court clerk, he says he also sees a downside. "It has become a guild, a narrow group of elite justices and elite counsel talking to each other," Luttig said. The court and its bar have grown "detached and isolated from the real world, ultimately at the price of the healthy and proper development of the law."

If a guy making almost $3 million representing a corporate leviathan like Boeing thinks the game is fixed, perhaps the rest of us should, too. Like so many other things that have gone badly wrong for the political commonwealth, this also began with the election of Ronald Reagan.

The rise of that specialty bar can be traced to the mid-1980s, when President Reagan's first solicitor general, Rex Lee, joined the Washington office of Sidley Austin. Demand had grown for lawyers who could help corporations roll back workplace, environmental and consumer regulations that had roots in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At Sidley Austin, Lee launched a high court practice focused on business clients. In the next two years, he argued a remarkable eight cases before the Supreme Court. By the time Lee died in 1996, other large firms were creating their own Supreme Court practices, largely on behalf of business interests. The star appellate lawyers, by virtue of the appeals they write and sign, help the justices winnow the pool of cases the court considers. Typically, the Supreme Court agrees to hear just 5 percent of the petitions filed by private attorneys. It accepts 21 percent of the cases bearing the name of a leading advocate. "They basically are just a step ahead of us in identifying the cases that we'll take a look at," said Justice Anthony Kennedy. "They are on the front lines and they apply the same standards" as the justices do.

As should be obvious, there is absolutely no public service component to this phenomenon. It helps the aging justices "winnow" their dockets. but it does so in such a way that it excludes the vast majority of the American people that may have cases regarding why they can catch their breathing air in a coffee can or light their drinking water on fire. Read the whole thing, as the kidz say. This is how a Gilded Age grows -- in the dark, moist corners of the most important places in the country.




the rest:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Supreme_Disenfranchment?src=spr_TWITTER&spr_id=1456_120385920
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RIGGING THE WHEEL: MORE TRUE TALES OF THE NEW OLIGARCHY - By Charles P. Pierce (Original Post) kpete Dec 2014 OP
K&R.... daleanime Dec 2014 #1
Clearly, the poor should have their lobbyists get Congress to... oh wait, never mind. Scuba Dec 2014 #2
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