The Supreme Court and why I want to write nonfiction

Dear Siblings,

I just finished watching All the President's Men for the first time, which, if you haven't seen it, is definitely worth the time. It's apparently a classic that I had never heard of until recently about the journalists who broke the Watergate scandal. It's an inspiring story for any writer (or wannabe): after all it's about how two nobody reporters were able to essentially singlehandedly bring down the Nixon administration. It's not only impressive, but makes me proud to be an american (and a Washington Post reader). In what other country could a corrupt government be brought down, without force, by a single newspaper?

Anyway, as I was thinking about the power of words (and missing my typewriter a bit - hence the font) I started to go over the events of the day in my head. I started this morning early - 6:00 - which as you may or may not know, is before the sun gets up. There's just something not right about getting up before the sun. It's unnatural. I was up because I had plans to make it over to stand in line at the Supreme Court building to get in to hear oral arguments about an upcoming religious liberty case Hein vs. Freedom From Religion Foundation. The case is fairly technical and not all that interesting until you pull back a bit and examine the ramifications. It involves a suit against the government over executive sponsered conferences about community initiatives that were allegedly partial to faith-based groups.

That's actually not the issue at hand though. The case is really testing the court on whether or not taxpayers have standing to sue under the establishment clause of the first amendment. That means (for those of you that didn't go to a discussion panel in order to get it more properly explained) that the debate is whether or not the ordinary taxpayer is injured enough by executive spending to have standing in the courts to sue the government. The government is of course arguing that they do not have standing. You should check out the BJC's position. Be sure to look at the blog if you do - it's got a transcript (kind of funny actually) and lots of surrounding articles.

So I got up at 6:00, and made it to the line outside by 6:30 (most of that time was spent, not getting ready or walking, but convincing my groggy self that it wasn't ok just to go back to sleep and pretend I didn't hear my alarm). According to the green card I got from the nice policeman I was 50th in line. Since they only let 50 of us in, that was pretty handy. They didn't actually let us inside the building until 9:15 or so with the arguments starting at 10:00.

Pretty soon after I got there a kid walked up behind me who immediately started talking to me. I was a little annoyed at first, since I had brought my 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to help me pass the time, but he was a nice enough guy. He seemed uber excited to see the justices, though he didn't know anything about the case and didn't really care. He's a freshman at George Washington and just wanted a celebrity citing I think. We got to talking, which, as you know, is pretty rare for me. It became clear quickly that he was a republican and described himself as a George Bush republican, something that he seemed to think was a dying breed. I'm not so sure that that's true, sadly, but I also am not sure he's really a GW republican but just thinks he is.

He assumed that I, being a Baptist which he found out from where I worked, was also a republican, I think, though I made it clear from the outset just how much of a moderate I really am. As a side note, I find myself playing the roll of true moderate more and more. Even though I'd really think of myself more as fairly liberal leaning I always seem to be explaining one side to another in a political or religious conversation. It's like when I was dating Meghan (always defending Meghan to Mom and Dad and Mom and Dad to Meghan), but on a bigger scale.

We talked a little bit about religous liberty since the opportunity presented itself, and I think I may have sold him on it from the "Nobody can tell me what I should or shouldn't believe" stance. I don't think he had really thought it through before. It's amazing how many Christians don't think about what it would be like if members of some other religion had the power to enforce or even just governmentally support their beliefs.

At some point during the conversation, although he was pretty nice about it, he brought up that he hated that democrats had won the recent elections on negativity: that they had won because they were against something rather than for it. I disagreed as to the extent that he was suggesting and how he was putting all democrats into one lump, when democrats are (as the saying goes) barely an organized political party in the first place, but he had a good point. Only I'd go ahead and apply it to all politics for the last 20 years.

I suppose that if you're against something (the war, a woman's right to choose, whatever) than that implies that you are for it's opposite, but I firmly believe that the way you talk about something matters. I'm so sick of everyone being against the other guy, just because polls have shown that it's more effective. It's more effective because it's easier. It's a Machievellian "better to make the people love you, but since that's hard to do make them fear you instead" approach to politics. Maybe that's smart, but it's bad for the country.

What has happened to our great speeches? What is the last great speech that we can culturally remember? I bet you jump all the way back to Kennedy. There were so many powerful lines that stick with us even today, even among those of us who weren't alive to hear them. They were passionate and importantly they were full of hope. I don't know how great a president kennedy really was, but his words were inspiring. As Charlie says on West Wing - "If they're shooting at you, you must be doing something right." The US government has more potential than any other organization maybe in the history of the world, either for bad or good. Government, Politics should use that potential to inspire us to become better than ourselves. I just want to be caught up in something great, in a period, a movement to which history will look back and say at least they had hope. At least they believed in something. At least they spoke courage and defied the surrounding dark, if only for a little while.

I don't know, I'm getting a little carried away maybe, but that's why I want to do some kind of political writing. I don't know if I have the skills to do that, to write speeches that inspire, or if I'll even get the opportunity, but I know it's what I want to hear, and no one else seems to be doing it.

- Warnie