There's no shortage of other shows in town

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

WASHINGTON - Washington, D.C., doesn’t get to host Mardi Gras or the Super Bowl, so the presidential inauguration is our spectacle.

It is both Mardi Gras revelry and Super Bowl elation, combined with what Ronald Reagan called in his first inaugural address "a solemn and most momentous occasion; and yet, in the history of our Nation… a commonplace occurrence.” 

The transfer of power from one president to his successor is an occasion for politicos, lobbyists and grassroots activists to hoist their champagne glasses and raise the roof.

Maybe you won’t be in Washington for inauguration week, or you’ve only been here years ago on a field trip with your eighth grade class, dragooned by fretful teachers to visit the museums on the Mall.

But plenty of spectacles routinely happen in Washington, even when a president is not being sworn in.

This is a town full of extroverts, political performers, and bit players who become famous for a while then are forgotten. (Remember Linda Tripp? Scott Ritter?)

Here are some of the places where you can see virtuoso performances almost every day...

The Supreme Court of the United States
The clerk proclaims in a voice filling the massive court chamber, “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! All persons having business before the Honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting. God save the United States and this Honorable Court!”

You can sit in the visitors’ gallery and listen to the nine justices interrogate the lawyers arguing for their clients.

The Constitution is being reshaped and redefined and you have a seat to watch it happen. If you’re lucky, you will be at the court on a day when the justices hear arguments on a controversy that gets everybody’s blood up: Ban the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance? Let alleged terrorists held at Guantanamo file suits in federal court?

Caution: you will likely need to line up early in the morning or the night before to get in to see one of the marquee cases.

But even if the case the justices are hearing on the day you happen to be there is a morass of technicalities that only law professors can grasp, these unelected eight men and one woman are worth going out of your way to see. After all, they can strike down laws that members of Congress spent month and months writing.

Unlike most of the rest of Washington’s political figures, they are in no danger of overexposure. They don’t do Meet the Press or The Colbert Report. They don’t crave celebrity treatment.

So the chance to see them in their natural habitat is one of the best things about visiting Washington.

And they are idiosyncratic personalities: Justice Antonin Scalia often badgers and mocks lawyers arguing before the court. And Scalia often uses the lawyers as a kind of handball wall against which he bounces arguments intended to rebut Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer.

Justice David Souter asks lots of questions, tugging and pestering and persisting — all in his wonderful New Hampshire country store accent. In a Guantanamo detainee case last year, he told Solicitor General Paul Clement that British judges “were exercising habeas jurisdiction in a polity in which Parliament is supreme.”

He drawled the word “Parliament” making sound like “PAAH-lee-ah-mint.”

Watching Justice Breyer
But the most fun to watch is Breyer. He has a patient professorial manner of setting out two alternative sides of a case, or two possible explanations of what Congress intended a law to do.

Then he’ll sum up by asking the lawyer, “So I need you to help me understand. Which one is it?”

On Monday, hearing arguments in a complex case involving a gold mine in Alaska and whether the Environmental Protection Agency or the Army Corps of Engineers should decide if mine tailings should be allowed to be dumped in a pristine lake, Breyer said to lawyer Ted Olson, “It's so counterintuitive, that all you have to do is take a terrible pollutant and fill the bottom of the lake with it and now it's up to the Army Corps of Engineers and not up to the EPA, that I assume I don't understand the statute, and you will explain it to me.”

The audience laughed and Olson replied, “Yes, I will, Justice Breyer.”

You may be lucky enough to see one of the veterans of the Supreme Court bar such as Carter Phillips, who have argued dozens of cases before the court and who have a gift for making the complex lucid.

Or you may witness an embarrassing gaffe, such as the one made by Virginia assistant attorney general Pamela Rumpz in a 2002 oral argument involving the death penalty and the mentally retarded.

“How do you account for a state like the one that I come from that has not executed somebody in over 60 years?” Souter asked Rumpz.

The lawyer had to admit she had no idea what state Souter was from.

Across the street from the Supreme Court are the House and Senate office buildings, where you can see another kind of spectacle, Congressional hearings.

Trapping the witness
Members of Congress know that the best chance of them getting a twenty-second sound bite on national news broadcasts is to pinion a witness, trapping him or her in an admission of some terrible misdeed.

I have my own favorites over many years of watching congressional hearings. One is from 1997 when the late Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., chided independent counsel Donald Smaltz for forgetting to tell a House oversight committee that he had been a registered Republican voter.

"You remind me of the late, unlamented secretary general of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim, who also had a lapse of memory. He conveniently forgot several years when he was a Nazi," said Lantos, a Hungarian Jewish émigré.

A flustered Smaltz said, “Are you suggesting that I am a Nazi?”

MORE FROM

Section Front

Remember the inaugural poem? Few do Agencies investigate canceled inaugural ball Obama campaign head gets big book deal Smithsonian wants Aretha Franklin's hat Quartet played inauguration to taped music Drum major in hot water after nod to Obama Do-over: Obama retakes oath of office Obama urges unity against 'raging storms' Ceremony is more celebration than solemnity   Lights! Camera! Inauguration! Section Front   Add headlines to your news reader: