CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN G. ROBERTS ROCKS DALLAS, IS IGNORED BY EVERYONE EXCEPT FRONTBURNER
A law-practicing FrontBurnervian was there and tells us how it went down:
The Chief Justice of the United States, The Honorable John G. Roberts, Jr., gave a major speech in Dallas last night. Rather incredibly, not a single local media outlet seems to have even noticed that the (still relatively new) head of our nation’s third branch of government was in town. Last night marked Justice Roberts’ first visit to Texas since assuming his office, and was the first visit to Dallas by sitting member of the Supreme Court in quite some time (Justice Scalia was here in 2001, but that’s the last such visit I can recall). And it’s not as if the Chief Justice’s speech was some sort of closely-guarded secret or last-minute event; the state-wide royalty of the Texas legal profession (everyone from the members of the Texas Supreme Court to near-Justice Harriet Miers to mayoral candidate Darrell Jordan to the dean of UT’s Law School) was in assemblage at the Belo Mansion for the 3rd Annual Tex Lezar Memorial Lecture.
Chief Justice Roberts was every bit as impressive in person as he was during his televised 2005 confirmation hearings, delivering an almost-hour long speech without using a single note-card or piece of paper. The Chief used his speech to mark the 150th Anniversary of the Supreme Court’s most infamous decision, Dred Scott v. Sandford (announced March 6-7, 1857), describing that case as a “disaster” and a “self-inflicted wound” that it took the Court decades to recover from. More importantly, the Chief discussed the proper role and place of the Supreme Court in our nation’s political life, using Dred Scott as the foremost example of the Court overstepping its limited judicial role and inserting itself — with disastrous consequences — into an overtly political dispute.
And no one in the Dallas media thought this was worthy of any coverage?
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