The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, November 13, 2022

“Driving Miss Daisy” at Flagler Playhouse, 301 E. Moody Blvd. Bunnell. 2 p.m. on Sunday. The place is the Deep South, the time 1948, just prior to the civil rights movement. Having recently demolished another car, Daisy Werthan, a rich, sharp-tongued Jewish widow of seventy-two, is informed by her son, Boolie, that henceforth she must rely on the services of a chauffeur. The person he hires for the job is a thoughtful, unemployed black man, Hoke, whom Miss Daisy immediately regards with disdain and who, in turn, is not impressed with his employer’s patronizing tone and, he believes, her latent prejudice. But, in a series of absorbing scenes spanning twenty-five years, the two, despite their mutual differences, grow ever closer to, and more dependent on, each other, until, eventually, they become almost a couple.

Notably: It is Louis Brandeis’s birthday (1856), that much more notable this year because he, more than Oliver Wendell Holmes (who lacked a heart), more than John Marshall Harlan (who did not have Brandeis’s range, though Peter Canellos’s book last year about harlan, The Great Dissenter may change one’s mind), more than Breyer (on whose dissents no judicial philosophy could be built beyond the idea of a living constitution, adopted by many), he was the great dissenter. He was the source of the Warren Court’s liberalism, a court that could take Brandeis’s dissents and rewrite them as majority opinions. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissents may come to play that role in a generation or so, though she tarnished her own legacy by needlessly clinging to her seat and not getting Obama’s message when he took her out to lunch. As National Review’s Jim Geraghty wrote last June, “By remaining on the court for another six or seven years, Ginsburg had denied Democrats their last, best chance to keep a majority on the Court that viewed the law the way she did. […] In other words, Roe v. Wade probably wouldn’t have been overturned if Obama’s lunch with Ginsburg had convinced her to retire.” Brandeis was a bit of a dour man. He was overtly and excessively serious, the scholarship of his opinions unequaled: Scalia had wit and intelligence but probably could not hold a candle to Brandeis’s intellectual rigor. The wonder is that he was appointed by a president who would have condemned so many of his opinions: Woodrow Wilson, who was no friend to privacy, checking police powers or racial and gender parity (Wilson was stronger as an anti-trust man, which had attracted him to Brandeis). Besides, the Supreme Court seat was a consolation prize. Wilson had lined up Brandeis for a cabinet post until he got advice against it. That Brandeis was Jewish was no small part of it. Lewis Paper wrote a good biography of Brandeis in 1983, an “intimate” one, as he described it, revealing the man as well as the jurist. But it’s Melvin Urofsky who wrote what for now stands as the definitive work, followed by the equally valuable book for the coming DeSantis era in American politics: Dissent and the Supreme Court (2015).

Now this:

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