Word: white
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Even as Carter was telling 100 Congressmen at a White House buffet dinner last week that the idea of a stiff gasoline tax "is looking better and better," legislators were beginning to snipe at the idea. Said powerful Democratic Congressman Charles Vanik of Ohio: "Are you crazy? Fifty cents is out of the ballpark...
...myth: nine sages in black robes, unelected, unreviewable, pronouncing the last word on the law. Throughout its 190-year existence, the court's decision-making process has enjoyed a special immunity from public scrutiny. Even during the '70s, in the post-Watergate era of full disclosure, its white marble temple stood as a sanctuary, its inner workings Washington's last well-kept secret...
...Watergate Investigative Reporter Bob Woodward, that made the nation's highest tribunal a "sitting target." Together with Washington Post Reporter Scott Armstrong, Woodward set out to do for Chief Justice Warren Burger's Supreme Court what he and Carl Bernstein had done for Richard Nixon's White House in All the President's Men and The Final Days. Fortified by a $350,000 advance from Simon & Schuster, Woodward and Armstrong spent two years reading cases and interviewing Justices and more than 170 former court clerks, top-level law school graduates who serve as confidential aides...
...Justices portrayed in the book, Burger receives the harshest verdict. He is limned as a vain and petty man who consistently tries to bend or ignore the court's rules in order to get his way. His frequent vote switching exasperates his colleagues: after one flipflop, Justice Byron White threw his pencil on the conference table and shouted, "Jesus Christ, here we go again!" The chief is portrayed as a legal lightweight whose opinions are shoddy and poorly thought out. Of one Burger opinion dealing with court-ordered school busing in Detroit, Justice Lewis Powell is quoted as saying...
...court has no one who fits that description, as the authors see it. Decisions turn on the shifting votes of "the group," as Stewart calls it, the court's centrist core-Stewart, Powell, White and John Paul Stevens. Harry Blackmun is described as having to struggle to keep up with the court's work load but, growing in self-confidence and independence, he increasingly joins the group. Justice William Rehnquist has the intelligence and the personal charm to be the leader but is too far to the right to consistently swing others. The two leftover liberals from...