Posthumous

You know, of course, that I am a constitutional scholar, a scholar of no little repute, I might add. I am no technophobe. Nor a fudyduddy. I know how to get news from the Internet. I am... how do young people say it? I'm cool. Yes, that's the word. Cool.

I was sitting at my computer checking the news when I learned of President Bush's Supreme Court plan. It was so preposterous and at the same time so alarming, given what the Bushies are capable of, that I must have clicked the refresh button on my browser a half dozen times, hoping a prank would be revealed. Just as I thought of checking other news sources to verify the brazen outlandishness, I felt the cerebral blood vessels constrict and the white light began flashing in my left eye. I retreated to my dark room with a cold cloth and a bottle of Drambuie.

When I awoke at dawn, the headache was receding and I was left only with the word "posthumous" racketing around my head. I had a sense that the word had repeated endlessly through the torrid night. Posthumous. Posthumous. Posthumous.

I crept into the morning light in a bathrobe and scrabbled under the rhododendron to retrieve The Times. At the kitchen table, fingers trembling, I warily withdrew the newspaper from its plastic bag and unfolded it, ever so gently, to expose the front page, ready for a Bush news assault.

Bush to Appoint Supreme Court Justices Posthumously

Oh, I was ready to be outraged, angry, appalled. Ready to rush to the op-ed ramparts, ready once again to condemn the Bushies. But then... I began reading.

Bush said he had decided not appoint living people to the court. Instead, he will posthumously appoint past justices. A panel comprised of the three most prominent scholars who are experts on the late justice-appointee's work will sit as one on the Supreme Court just as if they, in their collective wisdom, were the dearly, and generally long departed justice.

But what made my heart trill, what brought sweat to my palms, what made me suddenly realize that we Americans are blessed with a magnificent president, a wise, caring, compassionate, cerebral, insightful, loving, devout and truly wonderful man, a Republican though he may be, was this: He said his first posthumous appointment would be Mr. Justice Holmes.

Can you believe it? My Mr. Justice Holmes. My beloved Holmes. My life's work. Yes, I am a constitutional scholar, of no little repute. But more, I am the Holmes scholar. The Holmesiest of the Holmesians. Not only am I the country's, no, the world's greatest expert on Holmes, I am, in most respects, Holmes incarnate. I am Holmes. My wife left me when I became Holmes. I should add that not everyone understands me.

So there I sat at the kitchen table in my bathrobe, practically struck dumb with the realization that I was about to become a Supreme Court Justice, with no law degree and a wobbly Ph.D. from a backwater history department at a Land Grant college, me a member of the Supreme Court. Well, one-third of a member. Only in America.

I hurried to my study and pawed through a stack of papers until I found my copy of Cliff Notes for the Constitution of the United States of America. I quickly scanned it. By George, it didn't specifically say that an appointee to the Supreme Court had to be alive! Oh, those clever Bush people. To think I once said unkind things about them.

Of course it will be controversial. Yes, there will be a court challenge. The whiney liberals -- I was recently one , though I didn't exactly whine -- will have their day of bluster. But Dear Leader will persevere, as he always does. I -- Holmes and I, that is -- will sit on the Court.

It was tempting to go straight to the heart of things, to begin writing my, our, opinion on the showdown over Roe v. Wade, the revisiting of Brown v. Board of Education, same-sex marriage, elimination of habeus corpus and the looming challenge to the Emancipation Proclamation. But that would be like eating dessert before the main course.

Instead, I began organizing things on a yellow legal pad. Housekeeping matters first.

Would I get a full salary, or a one-third salary? Hard to live on one-third.

Would we three experts have to share an office with a triangular desk so that we faced one another at all times? Or separate offices, separate private bathrooms, separate lockers at the gym? Separate limousines, or one? A shared limo would be too much like commuting to work on the bus. Separate clerks, or a single, overworked, put upon, ever angrier shared clerk?

I made a note in the pad's margin: "Three 'experts'? Why not one?"

If a lobbyist threw a cocktail party for the Supreme Court justices, would we three go? Or just one? Which one? If we three went, shouldn't we be roped together somehow so that if a phalanx of lobbyists descended on us in an attempt to separate us and split our collective opinions, they would fail? Another argument favoring a single expert.

Next, I tackled the thorny issue of succession.

Supreme Court justices are appointed for life. They either die in harness or have the good sense to step aside at the right moment. But in the case of one of Dear Leader's inspired posthumous appointments, the justice is unlikely to die in office. Does the posthumous justice serve until all three experts have died? Sounds like another argument for a single expert.

It had been a momentous morning and I began to sense another headache. Abruptly, a chilling thought blew past, taking the incipient migraine with it. At this very moment, the White House was probably trying to contact me. Did they have my phone number?

Perhaps I should call and leave a number. They're probably setting up an Office of Posthumous Appointments to handle such things. The famed White House switchboard operators would know where to route the call, unless they've been replaced by voice mail. Press 1 for the President; 2 for the Chief of Staff, etc.

I'm not a technophobe, but I hate leaving voice mail messages. I find it's usually best to write out my message in advance and then read it into the phone after the annoying beep.

Copyright 2003-2004 William Stockton & Smithtown Creek Productions
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