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Posted on Sat, Oct. 03, 2009 10:15 PM
C-SPAN on the Supreme Court: This time it’s personal
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There’s a producer at C-SPAN named Mark Farkas. You don’t know him, but I’ve been admiring his work at cable’s town hall channel for more than a decade.
He’s the mind behind many of the weeklong/monthlong/yearlong projects C-SPAN commissions to fill out its schedule when the House and Senate aren’t in session.
The latest, on the Supreme Court, begins airing tonight.
My favorite may have been “American Presidents,” a tour of all the presidential libraries and estates. The show’s chief virtue was that it was self-deconstructing.
Until the series got to the Civil War years, members of the audience would call in every week and angrily insist that Washington/Jefferson/Polk/Fillmore was a terrible president because he put up with slavery. That would usually knock the on-camera historian off his script and send the tour guides scurrying for cover. Good times.
With “The Capitol” in 2006, Farkas began his latest venture, a series of high-definition tours of the federal government’s shrines. He interviewed Capitol employees, congressfolk and others to give viewers a long, leisurely look at some of the building’s most historic chambers and corridors, which are now mostly closed off to the public.
In 2008 came a high-definition tour of the White House, with President George W. Bush and Laura Bush as tour guides.
The next stop for Farkas was the Supreme Court. The building where the Supremes meet is also architecturally imposing, but it’s more modern and, in all honesty, less of a concern than the other two branches.
After all, when you think about it, what’s the greater curiosity: the rooms or the judges who occupy them?
“The Supreme Court is the most mysterious branch of government to people because there are no cameras,” Farkas said. “It’s not so much about the space but what goes on inside the space.”
So C-SPAN’s storyteller flipped the script. He decided to see if he could interview every living Supreme Court justice — there are 11, counting retired justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter — and ask in-depth questions about life inside that building.
To his delight, they all agreed. On the day I spoke with Farkas, he was heading over to the court to interview the newest justice, Sonia Sotomayor.
“We had to go through the chief justice to get permission (to talk to the others),” Farkas said. “Once that was given, we sent letters out to all the justices, not knowing how many would respond. There’s only nine of them, and as we found out later, they talk.”
One can only conclude, he said, that “they all must have seen some value to doing it.”
If you’re expecting to hear Antonin Scalia defend his stance in Bush v. Gore, you’ll be disappointed. C-SPAN wanted to focus on procedure — how 8,000 to 10,000 cases get winnowed down to the 100 or so the court hears each term.
“They walk us through the process of oral argument, through conference — which is a very fascinating experience, to listen to them talk about how they view conference — and then opinion writing,” Farkas said. “They make the point that yes, this is a mysterious process to people, but they say, ‘All our opinions are in writing. They’re out there.’ ”
They did, in the end, want to show off the building’s insides. There’s the John Marshall dining room, with the portraits of the two men who started it all: William Marbury and James Madison, the litigants in the 1803 landmark case that established the principle of judicial review that invested the court with the power it has today.
Posted on Sat, Oct. 03, 2009 10:15 PM
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