Coming on the heels of Judge Haynsworth’s rejection by the Senate, Carswell had seemed like a shoo-in . . . but a hard-core group of Senate staffers, led by Flug and Birch Bayh’s assistants, had managed to dump Carswell, too.
Now, with Nixon trying to fill two more court vacancies, Flug said there was not a chance in hell of beating either one of them.
“Not even Rehnquist?” I asked. “Christ, that’s like Lyndon Johnson trying to put Bobby Baker on the Court.”
“I know,” said Flug. “Next time you want to think about appealing a case to the U.S. Supreme Court, just remember who’ll be up there.”
“You mean down there,” I said. “Along with all the rest of us.” I laughed. “Well, there’s always smack . . .”
Flug didn’t laugh. He and a lot of others have worked too hard, for the past three years, to derail the kind of nightmare that the Nixon-Mitchell team is ready to ram down our throats. There is not much satisfaction in beating Haynsworth & Carswell, then having to swallow a third-rate yoyo like Powell and a vengeful geek like Rehnquist. What Nixon and Mitchell have done in three years—despite the best efforts of the sharpest and meanest young turks the Democratic opposition can call on—is reduce the U.S. Supreme Court to the level of a piss-poor bowling team in Memphis—and this disastrous, Nazi-bent shift of the federal government’s Final Decision–making powers won’t even begin to take effect until the spring of ’72.
The effects of this takeover are potentially so disastrous—in terms of personal freedom and police power—that there is no point even speculating on the fate of some poor, misguided geek who might want to take his “Illegal Search & Seizure” case all the way up to the top. A helpful hint, however, might be found in the case of the Tallahassee newspaper reporter who went to Canada in 1967 to avoid the draft—and returned to find that he was no longer a citizen of the United States and he now has ninety days to leave the country. He appealed his case to the Supreme Court, but they refused to even hear it.
So now he has to go, but of course he has no passport—and international travel is not real easy without a passport. The federal immigration officials understand this, but—backed up by the Supreme Court—they have given him an ultimatum to vacate, anyway. They don’t care where he goes; just get out—and meanwhile Chief Justice Burger has taken to answering his doorbell at night with a big six-shooter in his hand. You never know, he says, who might come crashing in.
Indeed. Maybe Rehnquist—far gone with an overdose of raw sowbelly and crazy for terminal vengeance on the first house he comes to.
More Bad Tendencies
This world is full of dangerous beasts—but none quite as ugly and uncontrollable as a lawyer who has finally flipped off the tracks of Reason. He will run completely amok—like a Priest into sex, or a narc-squad cop who suddenly desides to start sampling his contraband.
Yes . . . and . . . ah, where were we? I have a bad tendency to rush off on mad tangents and pursue them for fifty or sixty pages that get so out of control that I end up burning them, for my own good. One of the few exceptions to this rule occurred very recently, when I slipped up and let about two hundred pages go into print . . . which caused me a lot of trouble with the tax man, among others, and it taught me a lesson I hope I’ll never forget.
Live steady. Don’t fuck around. Give anything weird a wide berth—including people. It’s not worth it. I learned this the hard way through brutal indulgence.
And it’s also a nasty fact that I have to catch a plane for Chicago in three hours—to attend some kind of national Emergency Conference on New Voters, which looks like the opening shot in this year’s version of the McCarthy-Kennedy uprising in ’68—and since the conference starts at six o’clock tonight, I must make that plane . . .
. . . Back to Chicago; it’s never dull out there. You never know exactly what kind of terrible shit is going to come down on you in that town, but you can always count on something. Every time I go to Chicago I come away with scars.
The Campaign Trail:
The Million-Pound Shithammer
February 3, 1972
There are issues enough. What is gone is the popular passion for them. Possibly, hope is gone.
The failure of hope would be a terrible event; the blacks have never been cynical about America. But conversation you hear among the young now, on the South Side of Chicago, up in Harlem or in Bedford-Stuyvesant, certainly suggests the birth of a new cynicism. In the light of what government is doing, you might well expect young blacks to lose hope in the power elites, but this is something different—a cold personal indifference, a separation of man from man. What you hear and see is not rage, but injury, a withering of expectations.