Too Much Work for Justice John Roberts? by Linda Greenhouse
Last edited Thu Aug 8, 2013, 10:06 AM - Edit history (1)
Americans have undoubtedly learned more in the past couple of months about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and its extensive powers than in the previous 35 years of the court’s existence. But it shouldn’t have taken the renegade intelligence analyst Edward J. Snowden to let us in on a fact that, while hardly secret, had been little noticed: in establishing the court, Congress gave the authority to name its judges to one individual, the chief justice of the United States.
As Charlie Savage reported in The Times last month, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has used that authority to name Republican-appointed judges to 10 of the court’s 11 seats. (While Republicans in Congress accuse President Obama of trying to “pack” the federal appeals court in Washington simply by filling its vacant seats, they have expressed no such concern over the fact that the chief justice has over-weighted the surveillance court with Republican judges to a considerably greater degree than either of the two other Republican-appointed chief justices who have served since the court’s creation in 1978.)
The ensuing controversy is, I think, a good thing. The country is overdue for a discussion about whether we have given the chief justice – any chief justice, not just this one – too much to do.
While provoked by the question of whether Chief Justice Roberts has made the best choices for a particular court, the issue is a good deal deeper. The office of Chief Justice of the United States has grown enormously in recent decades in responsibility and complexity – not because of power-grabbing chief justices but because Congress has piled onto the office a large number of added responsibilities. What was Congress thinking when it told the chief justice to choose 11 federal district judges to sit on the foreign intelligence court, as well as the three additional judges who sit to review the special court’s decisions? (The selections aren’t subject to approval, or even consultation, anywhere else in the government.) Or how about other statutes that give the chief justice similar authority to staff other specialized courts and judicial bodies?
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/07/too-much-work/?hp
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