SUPREME COURTSHIP
Christopher Buckley
Twelve
Fiction
ISBN: 9780446579827
The American fascination with the law and all it encompasses is amazing. Surf your cable system on any weekday afternoon and you will find countless courtroom soap operas, where judges both real and pseudo preside over disputes that must be factual because no one can make up those tales. More Americans recognize Judge Judy and the now-retired Judge Wapner than John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the United States. Our national obsession with legal matters serves as the backdrop for SUPREME COURTSHIP, Christopher Buckley’s wry and occasionally humorous take on national politics viewed through the prism of the U.S. Supreme Court.
President Donald Vanderdamp is the most unpopular national leader since the Articles of Confederation. Things are so bad that a national effort has been undertaken to amend the Constitution to limit the President to one term. As the movement grows, Vanderdamp is confronted with a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The Senate, led by Vanderdamp’s arch nemesis Dexter Mitchell, rejects two qualified nominees using any reason they can find. One fails to clear the Judiciary Committee because in grade school he did not appreciate the genius of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.
The President plots his revenge and chooses Pepper Cartwright, the star of America’s favorite courtroom drama, “Courtroom Six.” Buckley’s portrayal of Cartwright is clear to anyone with eyes and ears; she is a glamorous version of Judge Judy, who, by the way, served as a trial court judge in New York before becoming America’s best-known judge. Senator Mitchell and his fellow solons are flummoxed. The nation will not tolerate denying a seat on the Supreme Court to the host of its favorite courtroom show. Democracy often works in very strange ways.
Buckley spends a great part of SUPREME COURTSHIP in the august chambers of the Supreme Court. His humor is anything but subtle; indeed his favorite comedians certainly must include The Three Stooges. The participants in Justice Cartwright’s first oral argument throw around legal maxims and phony legal precedents in the same fashion as the Stooges threw around malapropisms. At least none of the Justices slap the attorneys and holler “nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.”
Buckley certainly loves to skewer the Washington political scene, and he has the background for the task. He wrote speeches for the first President Bush and is the son of conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. Readers would need to be brain dead not to recognize Justice Silvio Santamaria as anyone but Justice Antonin Scalia. While most of the other characters are not so easily recognizable, it is because they are more of a mix of the media and political types that populate our nation’s capital.
Two parallel plots move SUPREME COURTSHIP through its satirical view of national politics. On one hand, we find Justice Cartwright and her work on the Supreme Court. With the exception of the aforementioned Justice Santamaria, none of the other members of the Court are easily identifiable. They do, however, share some similar foibles to Clarence Thomas, Warren Burger and other well-known justices. The second plot involves the re-election campaign of the unpopular President Vanderdamp, who, because he does not want to be President, becomes quite popular with the American electorate. Go figure!
All in all, SUPREME COURTSHIP has some funny and prescient moments. It’s not drop-dead, laugh-out-loud satire, but it’s entertaining and the kind of book political and legal junkies may well enjoy. In this time of bitter partisanship, maybe we should all just enjoy a little levity about our politics. Perhaps, like Christopher Buckley, we should not take things too seriously.
--- Reviewed by Stuart Shiffman
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