Dahlia Lithwick in Slate has an interesting article on why the Justices will likely stay away from any possible election-related litigation; I’m not sure she’s right but she makes a good argument.
The one item that puzzled me in the piece, though, is this:
Justice Stephen Breyer’s supremely weird confession this weekend at Stanford — that he was never truly certain he was being impartial about his vote in Bush v. Gore — doesn’t sound like the words of a man itching for a do-over. “I had to ask myself would I vote the same way if the names were reversed,” he told the law students. “I said ‘yes.’ But I’ll never know for sure — because people are great self-kidders — if I reached the truthful answer.”
I wonder what’s “weird” about Breyer’s statement. Seems like most people who are thoughtful and aware of the errors that they (as well as other decent but fallible people) can make would say the same thing, if they are in the mood to be maximally candid. Breyer wasn’t confessing that he was swayed by the parties’ identities; he was saying that he tried not to be swayed by it, and that he thinks he succeeded. But he was also admitting that, being human and fallible, he might have failed. What’s weird about that? Is it just that this sort of public candor is rare?
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