added.
“No,”
Campbell conceded.
Michael Fiske and Sara Evans sat in a special section of seats perpendicular to the bench. Michael glanced over at Sara as he listened to this line of questioning. She didn’t look at him.
“You can’t get around the letter of the law, can you? You would have us turn the Constitution on its head,”
Ramsey persisted after finally taking his eyes off Knight.
“How about the spirit behind those words?”
Campbell rejoined.
“Spirits are such amorphous things, I much prefer to deal in concrete.”
Ramsey’s words brought scattered laughter from the audience. The chief justice renewed his verbal attack, and with deadly precision he skewered Campbell’s precedents and line of reasoning. Knight said nothing more, staring straight ahead, her thoughts obviously far from the courtroom. As the red light on the counsel lectern came on indicating Campbell’s time was up, he almost ran to his seat. As the counsel opposing affirmative action took his place at the lectern and began his argument, it didn’t seem like the justices were even listening anymore.
* * *
“Boy, Ramsey is efficient,”
Sara remarked. She and Michael were in the Court’s cafeteria, the justices having retired to their dining room for their traditional post-oral argument luncheon.
“He sliced up the university’s lawyer in about five seconds.”
Michael swallowed a bite of sandwich.
“He’s been on the lookout for a case for the last three years to really blow affirmative action out of the water. Well, he found it. They should have settled the case before it got here.”
“You really think Ramsey will go that far?”
“Are you kidding? Wait until you see the opinion. He’ll probably write it himself, just so he can gloat. It’s dead.”
“I can partly see his logic,”
Sara said.
“Of course you can. It’s evident. A conservative group brought the case, handpicked the plaintiff. White, bright, blue-collar, hardworking, never given a handout. And, even better, a woman.”
“The Constitution does say no one shall discriminate.”
“Sara, you know that the Fourteenth Amendment was passed right after the Civil War to ensure that blacks wouldn’t be discriminated against. Now it’s been forged into a bat to crush the people it was supposed to help. Well, the crushers just guaranteed their own Armageddon.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that poor with hope starts to push back. Poor without hope lashes back. Not pretty.”
“Oh.”
She looked at Michael, his manner so intense, so mercurial. Serious beyond his years. He climbed on the soapbox with regularity, sometimes to an embarrassing degree. It was one of the elements about him that she both admired and feared.
“My brother could tell you some stories about that,”
Michael added.
“I’m sure he could. I hope to meet him someday.”
Michael glanced at her and then looked away.
“Ramsey sees the world differently than it actually is. He made it in the world by himself, why can’t everybody else? I admire the guy, though. He sticks it equally to the poor and the rich, the state and the individual. He doesn’t play favorites. I’ll give him that.”
“You overcame a lot too.”
“Yeah. I’m not blowing my own horn, but I’ve got an IQ over one-sixty. Not everybody has that.”
“I know,”
Sara said wistfully.
“My legal brain says what happened today was correct. My heart says it’s a tragedy.”
“Hey, this is the Supreme Court. It’s not supposed to be easy. And by the way, what was Knight trying to do in there today?”
Michael was perpetually in the loop on everything that happened at the Court, all the inner secrets, the gossip, the strategies employed by the justices and their clerks to further philosophies and points of view on cases before them. He felt behind on whatever Knight had alluded to in court this morning, though, and it bothered him.
“Michael, it was only a couple sentences.”
“So what? Two
“No,”
Campbell conceded.
Michael Fiske and Sara Evans sat in a special section of seats perpendicular to the bench. Michael glanced over at Sara as he listened to this line of questioning. She didn’t look at him.
“You can’t get around the letter of the law, can you? You would have us turn the Constitution on its head,”
Ramsey persisted after finally taking his eyes off Knight.
“How about the spirit behind those words?”
Campbell rejoined.
“Spirits are such amorphous things, I much prefer to deal in concrete.”
Ramsey’s words brought scattered laughter from the audience. The chief justice renewed his verbal attack, and with deadly precision he skewered Campbell’s precedents and line of reasoning. Knight said nothing more, staring straight ahead, her thoughts obviously far from the courtroom. As the red light on the counsel lectern came on indicating Campbell’s time was up, he almost ran to his seat. As the counsel opposing affirmative action took his place at the lectern and began his argument, it didn’t seem like the justices were even listening anymore.
* * *
“Boy, Ramsey is efficient,”
Sara remarked. She and Michael were in the Court’s cafeteria, the justices having retired to their dining room for their traditional post-oral argument luncheon.
“He sliced up the university’s lawyer in about five seconds.”
Michael swallowed a bite of sandwich.
“He’s been on the lookout for a case for the last three years to really blow affirmative action out of the water. Well, he found it. They should have settled the case before it got here.”
“You really think Ramsey will go that far?”
“Are you kidding? Wait until you see the opinion. He’ll probably write it himself, just so he can gloat. It’s dead.”
“I can partly see his logic,”
Sara said.
“Of course you can. It’s evident. A conservative group brought the case, handpicked the plaintiff. White, bright, blue-collar, hardworking, never given a handout. And, even better, a woman.”
“The Constitution does say no one shall discriminate.”
“Sara, you know that the Fourteenth Amendment was passed right after the Civil War to ensure that blacks wouldn’t be discriminated against. Now it’s been forged into a bat to crush the people it was supposed to help. Well, the crushers just guaranteed their own Armageddon.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that poor with hope starts to push back. Poor without hope lashes back. Not pretty.”
“Oh.”
She looked at Michael, his manner so intense, so mercurial. Serious beyond his years. He climbed on the soapbox with regularity, sometimes to an embarrassing degree. It was one of the elements about him that she both admired and feared.
“My brother could tell you some stories about that,”
Michael added.
“I’m sure he could. I hope to meet him someday.”
Michael glanced at her and then looked away.
“Ramsey sees the world differently than it actually is. He made it in the world by himself, why can’t everybody else? I admire the guy, though. He sticks it equally to the poor and the rich, the state and the individual. He doesn’t play favorites. I’ll give him that.”
“You overcame a lot too.”
“Yeah. I’m not blowing my own horn, but I’ve got an IQ over one-sixty. Not everybody has that.”
“I know,”
Sara said wistfully.
“My legal brain says what happened today was correct. My heart says it’s a tragedy.”
“Hey, this is the Supreme Court. It’s not supposed to be easy. And by the way, what was Knight trying to do in there today?”
Michael was perpetually in the loop on everything that happened at the Court, all the inner secrets, the gossip, the strategies employed by the justices and their clerks to further philosophies and points of view on cases before them. He felt behind on whatever Knight had alluded to in court this morning, though, and it bothered him.
“Michael, it was only a couple sentences.”
“So what? Two
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