Getting Along

As you may recall, I have been writing a book called Can’t We All Just Get Along. The phrase dates to the 1992 Los Angeles race riots. It was pronounced by one Rodney King. It was brilliant then. It is still brilliant.

Just don’t tell the grandees of the publishing world, many of whom seem to consider it a trivial matter. That means, my manuscript is still looking for a publisher.

Publishers seem to believe that the concept is old school. And besides, it is not sufficiently psychodramatic for their unsophisticated tastes. Of course, that is the point, alas.

So, now Linda Greenhouse is making the case for my book. I am very grateful even if I am confident that she does not know that the manuscript exists. Greenhouse promotes my thesis in a backhanded way, by writing an essay for the New York Times wherein she expresses her jejune view that Supreme Court justices do not need to get along. 

I am hardly qualified to comment on the Greenhouse view of the court system, but her efforts to disparage getting along expose her as a borderline fanatic, someone who eschews adult behavior and insists on getting her way. If she does not get her way, she will trash you in the pages of the New York Times.

When people do not get along their lives are filled with permanent psychodrama, they take everything personally and hold grudges and resentments. It makes for a miserable life and it also makes for a barely functioning court system. 

Fair enough, Greenhouse obviously does not understand this, but, if that is the case she should not be pontificating in the pages of the New York Times.

In short, Rodney King was trying to help us not to end up as tired old scolds, like Linda Greenhouse. If that doesn’t motivate you, nothing will.

To give her her due, Greenhouse reports on what the justices themselves have been saying. You might imagine that the justices are onto something when they tell us that they all get along, but Greenhouse does not get it:

“When we disagree, our pens are sharp, but on a personal level, we never translate that into our relationship with one another,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor told an audience at the National Governors Association conference in February. “We don’t raise our voices, no matter how hot-button the case is,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett said at the civics forum at George Washington University in March.

The retired justice Stephen Breyer, on the talk circuit for his new book on constitutional interpretation, has been making the same point. In a guest essay in The Times this month, he observed that “justices who do not always agree on legal results nonetheless agree to go to hockey games or play golf together.” He added: “The members of the court can and do get along well personally. That matters.”

So, justices from the left and the right agree on the importance of getting along. Apparently, Greenhouse finds it all rather offensive, because she thinks-- or at least pretends to think-- that getting along would compromise the court’s work. It is a bizarre and mindless notion, but what were you expecting?

It may be a bit of each of these or none of them, but the inventory itself suggests that what matters is what the court does or doesn’t do: that the legacy of the Roberts court will reside in the pages of United States Reports, the official compilation of Supreme Court decisions, and not in the justices’ datebooks. What counts is not how the justices treat one another but how they treat the claims of those who come before them.

So, as we watch Linda Greenhouse descend into incoherence, it seems not to have crossed her mini-mind that the one does not preclude the other. Getting along, not turning legal matters into psychodrama, not turning philosophical differences into personal animus, is the necessary precondition for objective jurisprudence.

In truth, the justices are trying to set an example of good behavior, of congeniality and cordiality in a country that seems wedded to constant psychodrama and fanatical gestures. 

As though she is not sufficiently confused and confusing, Greenhouse declares that collegiality is not the same as getting along. And yet, it certainly is is. 

“Collegial” in that usage is a term of art. It doesn’t mean that the judges necessarily get along. It means that these multimember courts act as collectives, when a majority coalesces. In a forthcoming memoir, “Vision,” Judge David Tatel, who recently retired from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, offers as good a definition of judicial collegiality as I have seen. “Judicial collegiality,” he writes, “has nothing to do with singing holiday songs, having lunch or attending basketball games together. It has everything to do with respecting each other, listening to each other and sometimes even changing our minds.”

Evidently, Judge Tatel does not understand the issue any better than Greenhouse does. Misery loves company, but so does ignorance.

Respecting each other, listening to each other and changing minds involves getting along. The precondition for such adult civil conversation is uniform manners. Because that is one thing that it means to get along.

It’s about group cohesion and social harmony. If you sit down to dinner and everyone is practicing different table manners, group cohesion does not exist. Then it becomes more important for people to cohere by indulging in groupthink, by thinking the same thoughts and believing the same beliefs.

If a group of people speak the same language and practice the same table manners, they can more easily disagree, without their disagreements threatening group cohesion.