Making a Case for Televising the Supreme Court - Miller-McCune
Over the years, media advocacy groups and news outlets have jotted off letters to the Supreme Court pleading for a basic form of access their counterparts in other democracies already have: cameras in the country’s highest courtroom.
The response has always been the same, but with varying explanations. Cameras would be too obtrusive. The wires and equipment would get in everyone’s way. Filming the court would turn it into a circus. The whole demeanor of the place would change. Justice David Souter summed up all of this with a jurist’s eloquence: “I can tell you the day you see a camera come into our courtroom,” he said in 1996, “it’s going to roll over my dead body.”
Justice Clarence Thomas has even argued that he doesn’t want to go on camera to protect his anonymity - perhaps the anonymity he gains by sitting in compete silence on the bench.
“But isn’t that just the point?” asked Kathleen Kirby, an attorney with Wiley Rein and the general counsel to the Radio Television Digital News Association. “That we’re entitled to see it even if he’s not saying anything?”
The issue has flared up again this week with the court’s announcement that it will rule on the constitutionality of the health-care law this term.
“When they took this case, I was like, ‘Come on! Now you have to do something,’” Kirby said. “I mean Obamacare has divided the public since it was signed into law. Everybody gets this. Everybody’s going to want to see what the Supreme Court does about this.”
The outcome will inevitably impact the 2012 election and could even provide marching orders to Congress for how it can set a whole range of policies in the public interest.