State U. grads need not apply

WASHINGTON -- Let's say you're a bright young man or woman who decides to attend the University of Michigan's highly regarded law school with the hope of some day reaching the pinnacle of jurisprudence, the United States Supreme Court.
If that's your ambition, the best advice would be to forget it.
Study hard, graduate magna or summa and Law Review and all that academically important stuff and it won't make a wit's worth of difference. The odds of your succeeding even after a distinguished legal career are slim to none unless you have had the benefit of the Ivy League generally and Harvard or Yale specifically. It is a rare exception when anything else counts -- maybe Stanford or the University of Chicago, but certainly not, ugh, Southern Methodist University where poor Harriet Miers learned to be a lawyer.
Assuming that the current nominee to fill out the court, Samuel Alito, wins confirmation after what promises to be one of those patented Senate knock-down drag-outs, the current score of the annual SCOTUS intra mural football game would be Harvard, 6, Yale, 2 with Chicago U's representative, John Paul Stevens, serving as water boy.
So for any mother out there who would like to brag about "my son the justice," don't let them him up dreaming about Berkeley or Madison, Wis., or Baton Rouge, La. Throw in the fact that African Americans and women both will be outnumbered 8 to 1 on the court and that Hispanic Americans, the largest of our minorities, aren't even present and the odds of being anything but white, male and "boola, boola" and reaching those hallowed chambers are really long. Oh, yeah. It also helps to have had some lower bench experience, preferably federal.
Indoctrination
Rather makes one concerned about the fitness of the court to hand down rulings on forced diversity and similar issues, doesn't it? In fact, it makes one nervous about most everything the court decides given that all these guys with the exception of Stevens and soon to be the one remaining female, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have been indoctrinated by essentially the same faculty. Actually, Ginsberg did attend Harvard law but graduated from an Ivy sister, Columbia.
Frankly, if I wanted to influence the nation's highest court, I would seek a position teaching at Harvard or Yale. At the very least, I could revel about all those important people who owe me their fame -- but not their fortune because they get paid by the government. One can only wonder how often faculty lunches end in fisticuffs over bragging rights.
Most disturbing about all this is that President Bush, after promising to look beyond the federal bench and into differing ethnic groups and state supreme courts and so forth, fell right back into the same old cookie cutter profile for his two nominations. He did give it a half hearted try with a bit of cronyism, but Miers was a dumb appointment, and in the long run she was smart enough to take herself out of the maelstrom.
So Alito, who has punched all the right tickets along the way and is thought to be conservative, now faces a Senate whose atmosphere is as politically poisonous as any in recent memory. Republican majority leaders engender little respect and their Democratic counterparts seem only interested in hamstringing the legislative process until next year's congressional elections. The onetime gentlemen's club seems to have degenerated into a daily clubhouse brawl between the Crips and the Bloods. Any Bush appointee who needs confirmation and doesn't suffer from masochistic tendencies might want to reconsider.
Different prospect
Alito, who went through this process with ease for his lower court nomination, now faces an entirely different prospect, with some of those who praised him in the earlier instance ready to eviscerate him now. Hopefully, he has warned his proud family about what daddy will be facing over the next weeks. But then Yale must have prepared him for this. They must have a class in how to confound a Senate committee with the old "Razzle Dazzle" --sorry, Bob Fosse. They certainly would at Michigan if they had a chance in the high court sweepstakes. But then their Midwestern approach to law always has been a bit more practical and less theoretical than their Ivy contemporaries.
X Dan K. Thomasson is former editor of the Scripps Howard News Service.