Judicial Nominations In the Internet Age 114
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Soulskill
from the accounting-for-your-every-tweet dept.
from the accounting-for-your-every-tweet dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Chris Good writes in the Atlantic that nominees to the Supreme Court and other high-profile positions are required to provide the Judiciary Committee with everything they've ever written or said publicly, to the best of their abilities within reason. Thanks to the Internet, the last major judicial nominee reported out by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ninth Circuit nominee Goodwin Liu, included links to YouTube videos of lectures and talks he gave, 573 pages of public writings, news articles about him, syllabi from courses he taught, and statements about legal issues. Even so, Liu was admonished for failing to fully disclose his writings and public speeches to senators, including appearances at such occasions as brown bag lunches and alumni gatherings. 'In preparing my original submission, I made a good-faith effort to track down all of my publications and speeches over the years,' wrote Liu. 'I checked my personal calendar, I performed a variety of electronic searches, and I searched my memory to produce the original list. But I have since realized that those efforts were not sufficient.' Not so long ago, entire news articles in local papers could go wholly unnoticed, by both the nominee and committee members and staff, but not so in the era of the Internet. 'Imagine what will happen when, decades from now, a president nominates someone to the Supreme Court who had access to Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook at the age of 15.'"
Looking back at my Internet history... (Score:4, Insightful)
...I'm just glad that I'll never be nominated for an appointment to any US government position.
Re:Most of my writings are long gone. (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess message board could also mean on a BBS, so they would not be available on 'the internet archive'. But judging by the low slashdot id, I doubt he/she is also talking about BBS.
It shouldn't matter what age we're in (Score:2, Insightful)
Some things never change. Some things you never do, regardless of the methods available.
Time to change the policy (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me that what's going to have to happen is that people are going to have to get over the idea that they can actually review every statement a nominee has ever made, get over the idea that people should be automata who never say anything possibly embarrassing (and thus that it even makes sense to want to review everything they've ever written), and get over the idea that there's some absolute bright line between the public and private life.
While we're doing that for the Supreme Court, maybe we should also do it for other random jobs. It's idiotic to check every Facebook a job candidate has ever made to see if they've failed to toe the line at all times. Doing that favors worthless nonentities.
These pretenses are technologically obsolete, and people need to deal with that.
Re:Time to change the policy (Score:1, Insightful)
When you enter the arena of public life, everything is on the table as it was one's choice to enter it.
Re:Time to change the policy (Score:2, Insightful)
...other random jobs.
I don't know any ditch diggers that could free me from jail, or sentence me to life in prison. Do you? For random jobs, no. For the boss, especially a judge, politician, cop, etc, that's different. I don't want some perverted bully putting me anywhere.
One person, many personae (Score:5, Insightful)
a president nominates someone to the Supreme Court who had access to Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook at the age of 15.
This is why it is important to realize that everyone has multiple lives: private, public, serious, fun, sexual, intimate, bigoted, religious, etc...
It is not enough to inquire about a person's character. People have many characters. The characters or personae overlap somewhat, but not greatly.
Consider the English judicial court. The lawyers and judges put on ceremonial robes and wigs to specifically separate their lives, personalities, and past histories outside of the courtroom from the current business inside the courtroom.
Consider the thousands of women who have posed for men's magazines. Millions of men use their images for sexual projection ('wanking' for all you insensitive UK sods). Thousands of men have found themselves in the situation where they are working with women that they masturbated to, and felt an intimate connection for a ten second window. Only a serious jerk would dig up the old magazines or internet erotic photos and flash them to the other co-workers. Porn is a separate realm: what is in the stroke rag or porn film stays there. The woman that you work with is not the same woman whose picture is in the magazine, even if it is the same person. One person; multiple personae. Simple Puritan brains can't handle this concept. But,hell, you mastered C language and Linux APIs, you can master real-world sophistication also.
We see this also in the peculiar American obsession for destroying people's careers over the presence of molecules of marijuana in their urine. What a weird obsession! 'You are the purity of your piss!'. When people are stoned they are not the same personae as when they are sober. Both conditions are valid. But have their place. The only valid reason to destroy a person's career over their intoxicational preference is if (and only if) they are uncontrollably intoxicated in a situation where they are supposed to be sober. Outside of that, different drugs make different personae. Only fascists refuse to accept this.
These politicians digging into the judge candidate's background and demanding every brain fart of the candidate's past are all assholes. They are transparent chickenshit party hacks of a corrupt and bankrupt political system. They have some minor importance now, but they won't in future. All they will have then is the eternal hatred and contempt of the people trying to live with the consequences of their stupidity.
Re:This is a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
If by "better qualified" you mean being a silver tongued bastard who has an innate ability to always say what's politically expedient.
Please note that this is not the same as being either honest or competent.
Re:Time to change the policy (Score:4, Insightful)
The West Wing - 11 years ago (Score:5, Insightful)
But of course, it's all a fiction. (Score:3, Insightful)
We may think we have all these multiple lives, but in truth there isn't anything separating them except for our own ability to compartmentalize them. We have but one life.
Re:Time to change the policy (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you missed the point. He's saying that nobody can live up to the standard of perfection demanded by voters. Everybody has "skeletons" in their closets, and the internet makes that even more important because it grabs and archives everything, even embarrassing posts.
Look at Senator Specter in Pennsylvania. He said something he should not have said at a Town Meeting. Normally that would disappear into the ether and be forgotten, but now everyone has cameras on their cellphones. It spread from the cellphone to the youtube, and then the national consciousness. Now you might say "Well Specter is an ass and deserves to lose," which I agree with, but I also think EVERYONE is an ass.
We all have said things we regret later. So we're ALL disqualified for the job, if you hold to that standard.
Re:Time to change the policy (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no policy. This is politics, not policy, and it's a result of the overly divisive politics that we've seen in the US since the 1990s (if not before). For most nominees, the issue isn't whether the nominee is pristine. It's whether the politicians ostensibly charged with vetting them are able to derive some political benefit from tearing down the nominee. It's also a proxy battle against the nominator, and perfectly good nominees get thrown to the wolves in the process.
Re:Conversely... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm less worried about Congress and more worried about the voters. Congressmen can be reasoned with, because for the most part they have embarrassing events in their lives too and can understand slips of the tongue. But not the voters. Imagine if you will:
VOTER #1: "OMG! Did you see what Senator Joe Smith posted when he was in college! Quote: Hey roomie: I am going to score some pussy tonight. Can I have the dorm from 8 to 12? thx."
VOTER #2: "Woah. He treats women like sex objects!"
VOTER #3: "Horrible. Let's protest against this womanizer."
VOTER #4: "Yeah! Girl power! Death to chavenists!"
And it spreads from there. It doesn't matter if Senator Smith is now in his 60s and does an annual walk with his wife & daughters to raise money for a breast cancer cure..... the idiot voters will skewer him for a post he made ~40 years earlier.
The tragic merge of of private / professional life (Score:5, Insightful)
I was actually having the same conversation with one of my coworkers last night. The subject: Facebook. There used to be a day and age in America where you lived a professional life, and a private life, and there was little overlap.
Really, as long as the work is being done, it does not matter at all what I do in my left-over UNSOLD time. However, thanks to facebook, your friends are not the only ones who can pry into your private life. These days, employers look into all of the details of your personal life to judge you, instead of judging you based on your ability to actually work.
In the end, it doesn't matter. I don't have a facebook, and no one is going to stop me from smoking joints in my spare (unsold) time.
Re:But of course, it's all a fiction. (Score:4, Insightful)
You may not realize it, but you act very differently depending on whether you're with family, friends, another category of friends or complete strangers. You adopt different personalities for different situations without even consciously realizing it. You might think you have one life, but in truth there isn't anything linking them except for the fact that they share a single memory.
"imagine what will happen" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One person, many personae (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually they share millions of wallets.
Ours.
Re:The tragic merge of of private / professional l (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, shit. You can.
Fucking Live Journal. I thought I deleted that when I was 17.
I think you've just made the point of this thread.
Re:One person, many personae (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not about "the purity of your piss", its about observing respecting the law.
Like it or not, Marijuana isn't legal in most places to possess or use, and in the time frame Clinton, W and Obama used it it wasn't legal anywhere. The outrage or lack of outrage has to do with someone running for the highest offices in the US government and if they respected the law. If they were working for Intel or GM, no one would care unless they failed a piss test.
Clinton did what Clinton did best, skirted the answer with a non-answer. Bush and Obama admitted to using illegal drugs, if I was asked the question I'd answer truthfully "Hell yea I did when I was younger, oh and later I had a medical marijuana script but it didn't work for me so I stopped."