Why I take it personally
A confession: I have never been able to just “agree to disagree” with American conservatives, to just see politics as a place where reasonable people can simply hold differing values and preferences. I feel a little guilty about this. Very Serious People are not supposed to succumb to this kind of demonization of the other side.
Reading a year-old profile of Chief Justice John Roberts in the New Yorker, I was reminded why I am this way:
In 2006, however, Roberts devoted his entire [annual report of the Supreme Court] to arguing for raises for federal judges, and he even went so far as to call the status quo on salaries a “constitutional crisis.” Most federal judges are paid a hundred and sixty-nine thousand dollars, and at that point they had not had a real raise in fifteen years. This request to Congress was universally popular among Roberts’s colleagues, who were long used to watching their law clerks exceed their own salaries in their first year of private practice.
Congress, however, snubbed the Chief Justice. Six-figure salaries, lifetime tenure, and the opportunity to retire at full pay did not look inadequate to the elected officials, who make the same amount as judges and must face ordinary voters. Roberts’s blindness on the issue may owe something to his having inhabited a rarefied corner of Washington for the past three decades.
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During the heart of his career, Roberts’s circle of professional peers consisted entirely of other wealthy and accomplished lawyers. In this world, a hundred and sixty-nine thousand dollars a year might well look like an unconscionably low wage. “Some judges have actually left the bench because they could make more money in private practice, and some Justices have complained privately about how it’s almost impossible to educate your family on that kind of money,” Prettyman said.
Let’s recap: these people are in government. Their jobs are to make legal decisions that have an impact on 307 million Americans. And yet to them a most pressing issue of those jobs is that earning 4x the median US income – a level that makes you richer than at least 95% of US households – is not enough, because their kids must under no circumstances go to public schools. These people are federal judges, and thus I refuse to believe that they are too stupid to realize that this kind of inequality in their country is something they should probably take into account when interpreting the law. Which means I’m left with only one plausible reason for such an attitude: gross moral failing.
Hazardous Morals 