Over at NRO, Ed Whelan has been following some bizarre manuevering by the federal district court judge in the Northern District of California who apparently is trying to have a televised “show trial” regarding Proposition 8.
Without getting into the merits of Proposition 8 or the legal challenges to it, I agree with Whelan that it seems highly unusual for a judge to authorize televised proceedings for this particular case as part of some new “pilot” project to see how televised proceedings work. Surely if there were going to be a test run of a new idea, it should be in a more run-of-the-mill case rather than this particular highly controversial one. Moreover, it does appear that public comment process has been completely short-circuited.