Editors' Note: The Spy has dispatched its Special Pale of Settlement Correspondent, I. Joseph Singer, to Kyiv to report on Europe's progress towards World War III. While we're waiting for his battlefront dispatches, we thought we'd provide an update on the latest skirmish in the American Civil War, now in its 423rd year. Enjoy!
By Law and Justice Editor Scott V. Sandford
with Nellie Bly in Washington, D.C.
The normally placid halls of Georgetown Law School have been roiled with a controversy over one of the Law School's deepest white man thinkers preemptively rubbishing President Biden's plan to address a 230-year absence of Black women from the Supreme Court by appointing one of the many available fine choices to the position.
All of the candidates are smart, qualified, experienced, and all have the single most important credential: if Justice Rapey Kavanaugh tries to take out little Brett for some fresh air during a conference, they are prepared to smash it to a pulp with their gavels.
But as with any effort to redress America's sordid history of racism, you'll find a white man with a political agenda to whine about it. Enter Ilya Shapiro, of the Georgetown Law School:
Among the Black women being considered for the Supreme Court vacancy is Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose qualifications include the following:
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| Is she really qualified to be Justice Jackson? |
Jackson has served as an assistant federal public defender, a commissioner on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, a lawyer in private practice and on two prestigious federal courts.
If elevated to the high court, she would follow in the footsteps of the likes of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, who took the seats of the justices they had worked for.
Jackson clerked for Breyer during the 1999 term after serving as a clerk in 1997-1998 to [First Circuit Court of Appeals] Judge Bruce M. Selya...
Why Shapiro thought that these qualifications were somehow “lesser” than those of the guy he was hyping is known only to him.
Actually, we're just s***ing you: we know exactly why. To a white reactionary racist, any Black woman can't possibly be as qualified as a white man. Do we have to explain everything to you people?
Then Shapiro tried to apologize. It did not go well:
"I regret my poor choice of words, which undermined my message that nobody should be discriminated against for his or her skin color," Shapiro wrote.
"A person's dignity and worth simply do not, and should not, depend on race, gender or any other immutable characteristic," he said. "While it's important that a wide variety of perspectives and backgrounds be represented in the judiciary, so blatantly using identity politics in choosing Supreme Court justices is discrediting to a vital institution."
The 227-year-history of Justices who were not Black women sitting in judgment of them never bothered Shapiro; it's the effort to add representation to a nine-member court that led him to double down on his drivel.
Since then, by the way, Shapiro has been so proud of his advocacy that he's taken down all of these brave Tweets.
Now you may reasonably be asking at this point: Who tf is Ilya Shapiro and why tf does anyone care what he thinks?
Ilya Shapiro is “[t]he incoming executive director for Georgetown University's Center for the Constitution.” Or rather he was until he started running his mouth, whereupon he was put on “administrative leave.”
If you are not an obsessive follower of the rankings of various American law schools, you should know that Georgetown Law is a highly regarded institution of legal education. In fact, it's known as one of the 14 schools that are in the Top Ten (we didn't make that one up).
Then we started to wonder: why doesn't this guy with lots of opinions call himself Prof. Shapiro? Then we hit upon the answer: because he's not. Instead, he was brought in as the Executive Director from, wait for it, a notorious white reactionary “think tank” (the Cato Institute), by which we mean a fake-academic institution funded by dark money to add a sheen of intellectual respectability to old-fashioned American ideas like greed and racism.
Or, as Georgetown Law's own flacks put it a trifle more elegantly:
The Georgetown Center for the Constitution welcomes Ilya Shapiro as its executive director and senior lecturer. He will join the Center on February 1 after serving as a vice president and director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, and publisher of the Cato Supreme Court Review. Shapiro will oversee all aspects of the Center’s activities with an emphasis on its Originalism Outside of Academia initiative.
And what is this undoubtedly esteemed center for “Constitutional Studies” doing? We would have thought any law school, even one less distinguished than Georgetown, would have a bunch of professors teaching Constitutional Law already.
Translating this doubletalk into English, it's a partisan effort to promote one very particular method of Constitutional interpretation called “originalism” which is used frequently as an excuse to promote the reactionary agenda, e.g., since the word abortion isn't used in the document, no woman has a right to control her own reproductive system.
How does it help advance this agenda? On the very same page, we get an exciting preview:
That would be the same Neomi Rao who was shoehorned onto the D.C. Circuit despite (or more likely because of) her immaturity, extremist views, and lack of judicial qualification and temperament. We didn't hear Lecturer Shapiro complain about her.
Why does this Georgetown Center even exist? Its origins are lost to history. Indeed, the School's own detailed timeline of significant events somehow fails to celebrate its 2012 founding.
We can only guess. We guess that establishing a center with reliably right-wing views helps Georgetown Law curry favor with judges (like Ms. Rao) and justices similarly inclined, and that always helps a law school win clerkships for its students and appearances by said judges on campus. When there are 14 schools competing for one of the top 10 slots, every bit helps.
We also suspect that money is involved. The Center's own materials don't tell us who funds it, because under an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, that's none of our f***in' business, right? Anyway, there's always plenty of pelf around for anyone willing to opine that the democratic branches of the United States Government lack the power to protect us from fatal disease, global warming, air pollution, and the effects of racism and poverty.
And it wouldn't be the first time that Georgetown did something less than pretty for big bucks. You may know that the University was founded in 1792. You might also know that in 1792 slavery was legal in the District of Columbia. That's part of the originalist interpretation of the Constitution that Georgetown's Center tries so hard to promote.
You may not know that the Jesuits who ran Georgetown relied heavily on slaves they owned. You may not also know that when things got tight, the Jesuits were able to raise substantial funds by selling the school's property. Not the land. The slaves.
Mulledy Hall, which was recently constructed, was named for Thomas F. Mulledy, who incurred a large debt while serving as Georgetown’s president in the 1830s. To finance the debt, he oversaw the sale of 272 slaves under the auspices of the Corporation of Roman Catholic Clergymen, a Jesuit organization that owned a tobacco plantation in Maryland and went on to found Georgetown. WAMU’s Michael Pope explains that Mulledy disregarded orders to keep the slaves’ families intact and not to use the sale of slaves to pay debts. Mulledy Hall will be temporarily named Freedom Hall, Shaver reports.
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| Originalism on the march |
How moving. You also don't know what happened after slaves were sold in that part of the world:
In 1834, Armfield [the slave trader] sat on his horse in front of the procession, armed with a gun and a whip. Other white men, similarly armed, were arrayed behind him. They were guarding 200 men and boys lined up in twos, their wrists handcuffed together, a chain running the length of 100 pairs of hands. Behind the men were the women and girls, another hundred. They were not handcuffed, although they may have been tied with rope. Some carried small children. After the women came the big wagons—six or seven in all. These carried food, plus children too small to walk ten hours a day. Later the same wagons hauled those who had collapsed and could not be roused with a whip.
Then the coffle, like a giant serpent, uncoiled onto Duke Street and marched west, out of town and into a momentous event, a blanked-out saga, an unremembered epic. I think of it as the Slave Trail of Tears.
The Slave Trail of Tears is the great missing migration—a thousand-mile-long river of people, all of them black, reaching from Virginia to Louisiana. During the 50 years before the Civil War, about a million enslaved people moved from the Upper South—Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky—to the Deep South—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama. They were made to go, deported, you could say, having been sold.
We hope something to celebrate emerges out of this tale of depraved evil and human suffering when a descendant of those slaves takes her rightful seat on the United States Supreme Court.
Unless more than 50 Senators listen to the pride of Georgetown Law, Ilya Shapiro.
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