Today in Supreme Court History: August 30, 1967

8/30/1967: Justice Thurgood Marshall takes the oath.

Justice Thurgood Marshall

Comments

[not guilty]

Thurgood Marshall was the first authentically black member of the Supreme Court.

Katanji Brown Jackson is the second.

[apedad]

Just curious....

Why do you have a qualifier ("authentically")?

Have there be unauthentic blacks on the SC?

[Mr. Bumble]

Because he is an asshole who thinks Clarence Thomas isn't "authentically" black because he isn't a liberal.

[apedad]

Ah....

My sarcasm detector wasn't turned on (too early).

[Michael P]

There was no sarcasm, just authentic racism.

[Krychek_2]

I think Clarence Thomas is an authentic black; I also think it's an open question just how much of the civil rights movement he would be willing to undo given the opportunity. Vidkun Quisling was a real Norwegian, after all.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

So who's Hitler in your metaphor?

[Krychek_2]

The people trying to undo racial equality.

[Bob from Ohio]

"Vidkun Quisling was a real Norwegian, after all."

So Thomas is a race traitor.

[Krychek_2]

“Norwegian” is not a race. Quisling betrayed his country, not his race.

What about the Jewish capos at Auschwitz. Were they race traitors? I suppose so, if one considers Judaism a race (which I don't think is correct). No, they were simply weak and shameful individuals who betrayed their own people.

[Bob from Ohio]

If not a race traitor, then Thomas is a traitor to America. Much better!

Comparing Thomas to "Jewish capos at Auschwitz" is disgusting and you ought to be ashamed.

[Krychek_2]

I did not compare Thomas to Jewish kapos (fixed the spelling) at Auschwitz; I merely asked if they were race traitors. And I only asked that question because you are the one who brought up the issue of race traitors. So I'm trying to gauge what your understanding of "race traitor" is. Perhaps rather than be indignant you could actually answer the question.

And you're doing what you always do, which is to deliberately misunderstand what was said and then go off on a tangent to avoid having to deal with the issue that was actually raised.

So let's see if I can clarify in such a way that not even you will be able to twist it: Suppose the dominant race in a particular society decides to actively persecute the minority race in that society. Maybe by enslaving them and subjecting them to Jim Crow; maybe by sending them to death camps. And suppose the minority race organizes to protect itself. And suppose further that certain members of that minority race take the position that accommodation is the best course of action. Now, are the accommodationists race traitors (and in this context, what does that even mean)? My argument is that we don't need to resolve that question. The accommodationists are betraying their own people, and that's sufficient to condemn them, whether or not they are technically race traitors.

[Bob from Ohio]

"accommodationists are betraying their own people, and that’s sufficient to condemn them, whether or not they are technically race traitors."

I don't see how this statement shows I " deliberately misunderstand what was said ".

You are calling Thomas an "accommodationist betraying his own people". In other words, a "traitor to his race" or "race traitor" for short.

What race are you again btw?

[The Margrave of Azilia]

It's too bad that people misunderstand you when you invoke Nazi comparisons to denounce Justice Thomas. How could people so wickedly misrepresent your position?

After all, if you were really using nazi and capo comparisons against Thomas, then you would have made your position ridiculous, so it's really unfair to mention your use of nazi and capo comparisons.

[Krychek_2]

Bob, so you're still not answering my question. Alrighty then.

Margrave, it wasn't a Nazi comparison, at least not until Bob invoked race traitors. Rather, it was a response to the issue of whether Thomas is "authentically" black. He is, and Quisling was "authentically" Norwegian, and both of them chose to stand with people doing the persecuting rather than those being persecuted. No invocation of Naziism at all in the comment I initially made.

I'm really having trouble believing you're seriously that dense.

[Bob from Ohio]

"No invocation of Naziism [sic] at all in the comment I initially made."

You compared Thomas to Quisling. Who did Quisling betray Norway to?

[FYI, only one "i" in Nazism. At least be literate when using Nazi comparisons.]

[The Margrave of Azilia]

"No invocation of Nazi[]sm at all in the comment I initially made."

Sure, and I bet you like telling people they're feeling a warm summer shower on their leg.

[Krychek_2]

Bob, I was comparing betrayal to betrayal. That one of the betrayers involved was a Nazi doesn’t make it a Nazi analogy. You know better.

And you still haven’t answered my question.

Margrave, you know better too.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

Either invoke nazism or don't, but I won't let you have your cake and eat it too.

"Let's mention Quisling, let's mention Jewish collaborators in the death camps, but I'm greatly indignant at the idea that I'm using Nazi comparisons!"

Krychek, you specifically told me that opponents of racial equality (as you interpret it) were Hitler in your Quisling metaphor.

[Bob from Ohio]

"one of the betrayers involved was a Nazi doesn’t make it a Nazi analogy. "

Yes it does. Benedict Arnold, Brutus, many other names were available. You reached for the Nazi one on purpose, as is further shown by the Auschwitz comparison.

[Krychek_2]

Bob, and Margrave, now you're just being disingenuous.

First, if I had used Benedict Arnold or Brutus, Bob would have been every bit as indignant and would still be refusing to answer my question. (Sorry to state the obvious but Bob knows that answering my question is fatal to his snide insinuation that I'm using a Nazi comparison.)

Second, I am not the person who introduced race traitors into this conversation; that was Bob.

Third, the kapos weren't even a comparison, they were a question.

Sorry, I have no more time for this.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

You’re practicing the Big Lie technique.

I'm pre-outraged at anyone who suggests I'm using some kind of Nazi comparison.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

Looking back on your comments, you sure seem able to slice the salami really thin:

“[Thomas] is [authentically black], and Quisling was “authentically” Norwegian, and both of them chose to stand with people doing the persecuting rather than those being persecuted. No invocation of Naziism at all in the comment I initially made.”

Who were the “people doing the persecuting” in your Quisling comparison?

[Bob from Ohio]

BOB, JUST ANSWER THE QUESTION!!!!

You said that Thomas betrays his people. Who are his "people"? Yale grads? RV owners?

[Magister]

Regular stock, like on the Walmart parking lot. Do you think he's been loyal to them?

[Frank Drackman]

Actually Hugo Black was about as authentically "Black" as you can get and was before either Thoroughly Bad Marshall or Ka-grungy Jackson Browne.

[not guilty]

I have heard that Hugo Black, Jr. said that his father as a young man put on white robes and scared hell out of black people, while as an older man he put on black robes and scared hell out of white people.

[Commenter_XY]

That comment was beneath you, not guilty. You're better than that.

[Bob from Ohio]

Facts not in evidence.

[not guilty]

Clarence Thomas made his bones as a black Republican critic of affirmative action. If he actually believed what he espoused he would have declined his admissions to Holy Cross and Yale Law School, as well as his appointments to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court. (His resume was paper thin -- work as an assistant state attorney general and as an in house attorney for Monsanto.)

As I've said before, he apparently believes that affirmative action is a really crappy idea for anyone whose first name isn't Clarence or whose last name isn't Thomas.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

How dare he run away from the plantation after eating his master’s food! The ingrate!

Isn’t it interesting how you don’t criticize the WASPy justices who got into school with extra points awarded for being white or gentile.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

Oh, look, it seems the first John Marshal Harlan, that foe of white racial preferences, studied at two antebellum Kentucky institutions: Centre College and Transylvania University.

They had racial preferences for whites at the time.

Centre College wasn't integrated until 1962 (see "20th Century Achievements and Growth"):

https://www.centre.edu/about/values-history

Transylvania University wasn't integrated until 1963.

https://www.transy.edu/1780/2013/08/transylvania-kicks-off-still-overcoming-striving-for-inclusiveness-a-year-long-celebration-of-racial-and-ethnic-diversity/

Harlan was *such* a phony. He should have joined Plessy v. Ferguson, just to be consistent.

[Frank Drackman]

Judge people on the color of their skin much?

[Yogis_dad]

A dark day in Supreme Court jurisprudence.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Wise v. Lipscomb, 434 U.S. 1329 (decided August 30, 1977): Powell stays Court of Appeals judgment rejecting reapportionment plan for electing Dallas City Council; plans submitted by legislatures (as opposed to plans ordered by a federal court) are entitled to some leeway and some at-large voting may be permissible; says good chance that cert would be granted (it was, and the Court agreed with Powell, 437 U.S. 535, 1978)

Dandridge v. Jefferson Parish School Board, 404 U.S. 1219 (decided August 30, 1971): Marshall, as you might expect, denies stay of desegregation plan; admits that changing from a dual to a unitary school system is difficult, but notes the “devastating, often irreparable injury to children who experience segregation and isolation” and cites the long list of Court desegregation decisions and notes that this Louisiana school district has been “mired in litigation for seven years”

[John F. Carr]

Without Marshall there would be no Thomas.

[Mr. Bumble]

How do you arrive at that?

[CJColucci]

Simple enough. With Marshall's retirement, there was pressure to appoint a black candidate that would not otherwise have existed. There is no other way that anyone with a resume as thin as Thomas's would have been named over the large pool of more highly-qualified white Republican prospects.

[Frank Drackman]

Without Breyer there would be no Ka-grungy Jackson Browne.

[Mr. Bumble]

...and we all know that PBJ was the best available candidate, because?

[CJColucci]

It’s long past time that we retired the “best available candidate” schtick. There is no such animal. Name a consensus best available Supreme Court candidate, ex ante, ever. For any given vacancy, there are literally several hundred lawyers and judges fully capable of being excellent Supreme Court Justices and thousands more who would be perfectly adequate. Oddly enough, when Republican presidents fish only in Republican ponds, or Democratic presidents fish only in Democratic ponds, they usually manage to come up with highly-qualified candidates and nobody complains that they should have cast a wider net to get the “best possible” candidate. If you fish in a small-enough pool, it will, admittedly, be harder to be assured of quality candidates. But the “black woman” pool is reasonably large, large enough to contain several quality candidates and certainly larger than the “black Republican conservative” pool from which Clarence Thomas was fished. Since there is no objectively “best” candidate, only a large pool of high-quality candidates, presidents can, do, and should let other considerations guide their selections from the pool.

[Dan Schiavetta]

well put

[The Margrave of Azilia]

This high in the political hierarchy, I'm willing to drop pure meritocracy and go for ethnic, religious, etc. balance. I wouldn't make this concession for a drug store clerk or an engineer, but with a job which is, to say the least, closely connected to policymaking and requiring democratic accountability, then I'd say the democratically-elected appointing authority can look for black women, Laotian immigrants, whatever, if that's what democratic representation calls for.

It's really too early to see if KBJ will be a good justice, that is, whether she disappoints Biden and starts upholding the Constitution. It would be nice for that to happen.

[Magister]

I am pretty sure that the guy with the awesome schnauzer beard was the best schnauzer bearded candidate, no matter how large or small the pool of schnauzer bearded candidates.

[SRG2]

Re: Thurgood Marshall - I strongly recommend Devil in the Grove

I've mentioned this before, I think. There's a passage in the book where Marshall tells his young attorney colleagues that if they're in Florida defending a black client accused of rape, when a jury convicts him but rejects the death penalty, it means that the defence was successful and the jury think the man was innocent, because if they really thought he was guilty, they'd have voted to execute him.

[Dan Schiavetta]

today’s movie review: Inherit the Wind, 1960

The Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925, rewritten as a reaction to 1950’s McCarthyism. The theme of the film (and the play it was based on) is freedom of speech but that was not what the original trial was about, where William Jennings Bryan (“Matthew Harrison Brady”) squared off against Clarence Darrow (“Henry Drummond”). At issue was the teaching of evolution, prohibited under a new Tennessee law (which in fact wasn’t repealed until 1967). As Edward J. Larson points out in his excellent book, “Summer for the Gods”, Darrow wasn’t really anti-religion, and Bryan wasn’t really anti-science. What Bryan feared were the implications people were drawing from evolution, namely eugenics and “social Darwinism”. It’s unknown whether Bryan ever read the textbook at issue, “Civic Biology”, but it taught that the white race was the most intelligent, and that it should be allowed to procreate more freely than the others. It had other fun stuff too.

Scopes had been recruited by the ACLU to challenge the new law. After the conviction the judge wisely imposed a small fine which “Brady” is outraged by but in fact Bryan offered to pay it. “Drummond” is made out to be a crackerjack attorney but in fact Darrow, like a lot of “high-profile” trial attorneys, made such a hash of the record that the ACLU gave up on any appeal, which frustrated the whole project (what they really wanted was to get to the Tennessee Supreme Court). “Drummond” is treated like some kind of antichrist by the local people but in fact Darrow was surprised at the courteous welcome he received. So was H.L. Mencken, whom the movie (in the character of “Hornbeck”, played by Gene Kelly in his first serious role) makes out to be an obnoxious, cynical wisecraker. Well, Mencken really was that.

I was in my high school production of this play. I played the mayor (played much better in the film by Philip Coolidge, one of Hollywood’s many fine character actors, who excelled at playing nervous, insecure people in authority). Later in life as the director of a crisis center I found myself in the same situation the mayor was in, trying to calm tensions and keep the lid on and mediate between hotheads.

I don’t think any court would allow one of the attorneys to testify as a fact witness, but it was allowed both in the movie and in real life. (I almost testified in my first trial, but that was an even wilder ride than this one.)

Spencer Tracy got nominated for Best Actor but his character is basically a saint (this was liberal Hollywood making itself feel good, like it did when it actually gave the Best Actor Oscar to Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch two years later). The great performance here is by Fredric March who plays “Brady” as a tragic figure. March’s real-life wife plays Brady’s wife and the interaction between the two is touching. The script does allow Brady a measure of depth, being both bullying and tender (note how he breaks up the prayer meeting when the Claude Akins character gets carried away in condemnation). The film acknowledges that in the past Brady and Drummond were united in their progressive activism (as were Bryan and Darrow).

The porch scene between Brady and Drummond is justly praised but for the wrong reason. It’s not because of the allegory presented by Drummond’s story of the defective hobby horse. The underlying emotional struggle, which the film does not bother to develop, is hinted at by Brady when he says, “These are simple people. They work hard and they need something to believe in — something more perfect than what they have.”

Then there are the (all-male, letter-wearing) students who are in Scopes’s corner, and the carnival atmosphere with the cigarette-smoking monkey, the comedy of “Brady” eating constantly, even in court (this is true to life — Bryan loved to eat and his death six days after the trial ended was probably due to untreated diabetes). But like The Caine Mutiny, reviewed her last week, the film is of two minds. Just like that movie tells us that mutiny is wrong, after graphically showing us a mutiny that was brave and necessary, here we end with “Drummond” reverently carrying the Bible out of the courtroom, without showing us how it is of any use. Bible-believers are not portrayed well, particularly not Akins as a preacher whose rigid fundamentalism is shown to be due to devastating grief over the loss of his wife, and one guesses that he is actually angry at God for taking her away (the writers of this era were steeped in Freud and probably had to strain to keep the word “displacement” out of the script).

As noted by Larson, Bryan was one of a disappearing tribe — white evangelicals who were liberal on most issues. He could get carried away (as a political colleague put it, “he is unable to think in the sense that you or I understand the word”) but if you look at their personal lives, you see that Bryan was much the better man. Darrow’s reaction to Bryan’s death was not exactly gracious. Bryan is remembered today as almost a buffoon but I would have liked to sit down with him, alone, with no crowd to please, and have a quiet conversation and see what he opens up about.

[SRG2]

It was indeed a good but loaded film.

I expect that we will see a few evolution trials in the next few years - though not with the personal drama of the Scopes Trial.

[David Nieporent]

The other thing to note is that the whole trial (the real one, not the movie one) was a sham. It was a spectacle for tourist dollars, with everyone in on it.

[Magister]

At least there was some intent to bring the issue to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which found the law constitutional.

[not guilty]

No, the Tennessee Supreme Court did not find the law unconstitutional. It rejected attacks on the constitutionality of the statute, which had been pressed on a variety of theories. Scopes v. State, 154 Tenn. 105, 289 S.W. 363 (1927). The Court vacated the conviction of Scopes because the trial judge himself undertook to impose the minimum fine of $100 authorized by the statute, contrary to a provision of the Constitution of Tennessee requiring that a fine in excess of $50 must be assessed by a jury. 154 Tenn. at 120-21. (The jury had found the defendant guilty but did not assess the fine.)

[Magister]

I think I said that they found it constitutional. Yes, I did say that. I can't figure out who you were trying to reply to.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Magister, not guilty:

I stand corrected, thanks. I was wrong when I said the ACLU gave up on an appeal (it was based on something I read years ago ) though I do know as an appellate attorney I’ve seen good grounds for appeal thwarted because the trial attorney, carried away by his ego, messed up the record or forgot to object to something.

I see from the Tennessee Supreme Court’s decision that an Establishment Clause argument was made (and rejected) but it was based not on the First Amendment but on a parallel provision in the state constitution. In those pre-incorporation days, there was no federal issue and so no further appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

[Dilan Esper]

Good review of a flawed film.

But I think this is incomplete:

As Edward J. Larson points out in his excellent book, “Summer for the Gods”, Darrow wasn’t really anti-religion, and Bryan wasn’t really anti-science. What Bryan feared were the implications people were drawing from evolution, namely eugenics and “social Darwinism”.

Certainly Bryan (as many on the Protestant religious right and many within Catholicism as well (such as Justice Pierce Butler)) feared eugenics and Social Darwinism. But that leaves Bryan off the hook-- he also, pretty clearly, believed in Biblical inerrancy and saw science as a threat. Indeed, the entire history of humanity since Galileo, and yes, on both sides, is a history of science crashing into ideology and science eventually winning, but with ideologues resisting science as long as they can. And that's what Bryan and his religious right was doing here.

Religious figures like the Pope talk about evolution now as if it is perfectly compatible with Christianity, but that's really something of a lie. Yes, you can posit a God who directs evolution to produce humanity, but that's not what the Bible said happened.

And even more importantly, the key insight of Darwinism is we are just a bunch of apes. Those townfolk in "Inherit the Wind" understand this, by the way. And if we are just a bunch of apes, well, we aren't special. We aren't separate and apart from the animal kingdom, we're just part of it. And that narrative directly threatens the Christian narrative that we are some chosen species created in God's image who is central to God's project and God wants to save. Indeed, if you actually think about the details, Darwin very strongly challenges Christianity. What, for instance, was the point in which we became God's special species in God's image? Were Homo Erectus made in God's image? Homo Neanderthalis? Homo Habilis? Australopithecines? What about chimpanzees and great apes? Was there a point where suddenly we were no longer animals and became creations in God's image?

The public got this. And preachers especially did. You can make extraordinary efforts (as the Pope now does) to square Darwin and Christianity, but in terms of the basic narrative that most believers believed in the late 19th and early 20th Century, Darwin shattered it. And nobody was more representative of late 19th and early 20th Century American Christianity than William Jennings Bryan. He HAD to fight this and was, indeed, anti-science in the worst way, at least as to THIS scientific issue. One man proved 40% or more of Bryan's theology wrong. He was a threat, and teaching it to children was a threat.

So no, don't romanticize Bryan. Yes he was a liberal. Yes he was ahead of his time on monetary policy and wanted to avoid the immiseration of millions of people. Yes he was a talented lawyer and politician with interesting ideas. And yes he correctly opposed eugenics and Social Darwinism.

But he was also one in a long line of ignorant ideologues who had the audacity to try and stand in the face of scientific progress, truth, and the advancement of human knowledge, to save his own ideology. And those people are rightly condemned in history.

[SRG2]

I think it depends fundamentally on whether your version of Christianity requires literal inerrancy – and this is an ancient divide even within Christianity, as evident in St. Augustine’s warning Christians against it on the grounds that if then something in the Bible is found to be errant, it undermines other claims made for it and in it, whereas not insisting on inerrancy avoids that undermining.

Hence it is perfectly consistent within Catholicism, which in mainstream form does not insist on inerrancy, to read some of the Bible, particularly the two – contradictory – creation accounts figuratively. So the Pope isn’t engaging in the contortions you seem to think he is.

[Dilan Esper]

I agree that not believing in inerrancy gets you out of some of the critiques (although note, Bryan believed in inerrancy). But it doesn't get you out of all of them- specifically, it's very hard to conceive of a Christianity where humans are just a form of apes produced by some semi-random genetic mutations and natural selection. That's not an issue of Biblical inerrancy; the Bible can be wrong in all sorts of ways, but if we're not special, if we're just a bunch of apes with overdeveloped intellects, there's not much room for the Christian story which posits us at the center of God's concerns.

[SRG2]

IIRC Stephen Jay Gould (a fellow atheist Jew) noted that the Catholic clerics he engaged with generally thought that at some point a few hundred thousand years ago, God intervened and endowed proto-H. sapiens with a soul and that created a spiritual distinction between us and the rest of Creation. And of course this was all part of Ye Planne.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Yes, the Adam and Eve story is ludicrous. But what distresses me more is the "moral" of the story. They were ejected from Paradise because they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, and obtained a knowledge of Good and Evil.

As Mark Twain put it, "The Church still prizes the Moral Sense as man's noblest asset today, although the Church knows God had a distinctly poor opinion of it and did what he could in his clumsy way to keep his happy Children of the Garden from acquiring it."

[The Margrave of Azilia]

The team that wrote Inherit the Wind produced at least one other somewhat-simplified historical narrative: Jerome Lawrence and (trigger warning) Robert E. Lee also wrote The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, basically a love song to the hippies.

They did First Monday in October, too, inspired by The Brethren, where a conservative Supreme Court justice and a liberal one either fall in love or at least forge a special connection, I forget the details.

My hypothesis is that the Scopes trial provided urban progressives an ideal opportunity to cut themselves off from the rural populists, recasting the latter as evil conservatives and the urban progressives as the sole bearers of the liberal banner.

Bryan wasn’t a reactionary who simply happened to have a few progressive positions. He took up cause after left-wing cause, from bimetallism to curbing reactionary judges to international arbitration to prohibition (whose major left-wing elements can be found even in Ken Burns’ documentary). His crusades were based on his beliefs on what God wanted (justice for the poor, world peace, temperance); he drew little if any distinction between politics and theology. Come to think of it, neither did Wilson, his ally until Bryan resigned in protest of Wilson’s drift to war (while Darrow was promoting intervention in WWI).

Bryan was willing to allow a metaphorical interpretation of Biblical days (prompting Mencken’s mockery), and for that matter he was happy to overlook Biblical passages allowing at least moderate alcohol use, but he drew the theological line at Darwinism, definitely including social Darwinism. Recall that the Tennessee legislature didn’t adopt the 7th Day Adventist position of rejecting evolution *tout court,* it said human beings couldn’t be fitted into the evolutionary framework by being portrayed as descendants of lower animals.

Why the selective fundamentalism? My speculation would be that Bryan was in fact reacting in part against the social-Darwinist part of Darwinism.

[Dr. Ed 2]

", Bryan was one of a disappearing tribe — white evangelicals who were liberal on most issues."

I'd argue era -- and that FDR changed that.

1925 was the Coolidge Administration, the shrinking of the Federal Government (and Coolidge actually shrank it). Back then, it was the clergy who advocated Liberal causes with the underlying Protestant social and moral values universally unquestioned.

Starting with Roosevelt, government replaced God -- and then in the 1960s (if not earlier) the underlying Protestant social and moral values were no longer universally accepted so you had a shift of the clergy to defending those instead of advocating the Liberal cause that the (better funded) government was already dealing with.

The same thing happened with the Republican Party in the 1930s -- there is an interesting study of voter registrations in the then-small towns along Midcoast Maine. They were almost universally Democrats during the 1920s because they hated the railroads (which had driven their smaller narrow gauge railroads* out of business) -- but once that FDR was elected, they instantly all became Republicans because they hated FDR more.

It is what I expected Trump to do to the GOP -- to make all the RINOS become Democrats and it still might happen.

* Standard gauge is 4' 8.5" between the rails and is universal in the US today. Narrow gauge (in Maine) was just 2' between the rails, with both lighter rail and smaller/lighter trains.

The advantages of narrow gauge was that it could curve a lot more than standard gauge could, needed a narrower railbed, and hence was (a) cheaper to build and (b) could go through places that a standard railroad couldn't (at least without a *LOT* of blasting and filling). Maine's mountains and hence rivers (which long had been used for transportation) run from the Northweast to Southeast and hence the narrow gauge railroads wanted to go from the ocean up into the mountains and connect with other narrow gauge railroads already up there.

The standard gauge railroads came up from Boston, and they were going West to East -- across the rivers rather than following them, and they had the money to do things like build the Carlton Bridge in Bath (1927) -- and before that, ferry trains across.

Well the Maine Central said that no narrow gauge railroad could cross its tracks -- not at gauge, not above it, nor below it -- and that did in the narrow gauge railroads -- except that the standard gauge couldn't follow their routes. Hence economic stagnation that preceded the Depression, and why some parts of Maine still don't have the economic development you'd think they'd have.

[SRG2]

FWIW, major rail should have adopted Brunel's 7-foot gauge.

[Mr. Bumble]

That would create some huge right of ways.

[Syd Henderson]

By the way, I come from Bath and crossed the Carlton Bridge any number of times, including on foot. I think it's still in use as a train bridge.

[Frank Drackman]

are you sure she's a woman? Ka-grungy can't tell. And yes, I know, my mom (redacted) Thoroughly Bad Marshall, The Harmlem Globe Trotters, and every member of the Jackson 5.

[Bob from Ohio]

"woman"

Are you a biologist?

[Mr. Bumble]

"...and the Court needed a black woman."
Based on what? How about an Asian woman or an American Indian woman or maybe a trans woman?

[Ed Grinberg]

...the Court needed a black woman.

Hardly. What the Court needed was the smartest, most qualified, most honest judge available. And I don't think KBJ was it.

[Magister]

Yes, to get representation of smaller demographic groups, we're going to have to expand the Supreme Court. Good idea, Bumble!

[Mr. Bumble]

No need to expand, just consider best qualified, which PBJ was not.
Picking people because they check the right boxes is a terrible way to go. Ergo the first female Vice President.

[Magister]

OK, expand the court and pick the best qualified new justices. I'm OK with that plan too.

[Mr. Bumble]

Where did I advocated expanding the Court? That’s your desire. I'm fine with nine. Pick the best qualified; sure.

[Magister]

We're more likely to get the best qualified appointee if there are more vacancies, since then we won't have to decide between two top contenders, which we might get wrong. Yes, you've convinced me that we should expand the court.