Specter to SCOTUS: You’re on Candid Camera!
At least, that’s how he thinks it should be.
Senator Arlen Specter wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post Tuesday arguing that the Court needs to suck it up and accept his bill to open up the Court to television cameras. With all due respect to Senator Specter, but his camera bill is a lot of static.
The inner working of the Court have been shrouded in mystery since the Court was created. To this day, many of the mechanisms are simply unknown. Requiring the Court to open itself to television cameras will provide no additional insight. No longer is the well of the Court the great forum for legal debate; issues are largely disposed of in written briefs (and, more cynically, in the jurisprudence of the Justices). The oral arguments do have some worth, but adding a television camera will not add any depth to the debate. For those who want to listen to the debates, they are available as audio recordings. This should satisfy the curiosity of the C-SPAN junkie and Court-watcher alike. No other federal court, after all, is being subjected to the requirement of being available to the viewing public, so why the Court?
