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BrandonHoltSecondEssay 6 - 07 Jun 2022 - Main.BrandonHolt
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| | | The Impact
Aziz Rana pointedly wrote about the history that allows denials of the US's perpetuation of racial violence to remain in mainstream dialogue in “Colonialism and Constitutional Memory.” She argued that America denies its settler roots and subjugation of Native and African people because the American Constitution, as a symbol, “sustains a particular narrative of the country as free and equal from the founding.” Rather than reckoning with this history, America’s insistence in “read[ing] a liberal and egalitarian identity into the country’s founding” obfuscates the necessity to engage in “structural transformation.” Rana further contemplated the impact of this dishonesty on Black radical and civil rights movements in the mid-twentieth century. She argued that these movements, by necessity, appealed to the narrative of American liberalization and possibility. The majority’s dishonesty “required [B]lacks to deny that their sustained experience of enslavement and subordination embodied an essential, perhaps irredeemable, truth about the nation’s character.” | |
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< | This dissonance continues and in many ways contributes to the dance that is the judiciary generally but also judicial confirmation hearings specifically. The judiciary is framed as an apolitical body that merely adjudicates the controversies before it. But the judiciary’s work does not happen in a vacuum. The judiciary determines and informs how we are organized as a society and that is a deeply political function. When you combine the lack of honesty about the role and nature of the judiciary with the dishonesty around the political identity of the country, the result is the inability of judicial nominees to meaningfully engage in dialogue about how to rectify the country’s past harm and shape the country’s future.
But perhaps meaningful
dialogue about how to serve the country is not actually the
objective we want, let alone expect, from confirmation. I have a hard time calling to mind any occasion in the history of the republic on which they have served this purpose. Actual testimony by nominees to any office, judicial, executive or diplomatic began only in the 20th century. Confirmation hearings as we have come to know them are political broadcasting shows; if we don't want them to be that, why hold them at all?
Indeed, I'm not sure this essay really has confirmation as its subject. Let's ask what this essay would be about if the Senate did its advising and consenting without hearings. You would still have a subject, it seems to me, and the subject of that essay is probably the subject of this one's next draft: What does it mean, in fact, for a Supreme Court Justice to have an agenda? What kind of an agenda does a Justice actually have and how does he or she go about obtaining what it calls for?
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> | Rana provides a useful analysis to understand how the false self-understanding of the country disrupts efforts to liberate marginalized communities. The Court, agendas of justices, and confirmation hearings are certainly not immune to this orientation and in many ways benefit from the perpetuation of this distortion. Specifically, the distortion frames the judiciary as an apolitical body that merely adjudicates the controversies before it. Thus the infrastructure of the judiciary requires the obfuscation displayed by prospective justices in confirmation hearings to maintain its apolitical façade. Even if a sitting justice were to have a progressive agenda, Rana rightly argues that "any reform projected [is forced] to proceed exclusively within a framework compelling to the majority self-understanding." But the judiciary’s work does not happen in a vacuum. The judiciary determines and informs how we are organized as a society and that is a deeply political function. To engage in this political function in a meaningful way the the judiciary would benefit from rejecting the distorted understanding of the country, and itself as a result. | | |
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. |
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