Posted on by rjonakait

Sin Boldly

Too much of this Golden-Rule-Do-Unto-Others stuff is destroying our society. You can care too much. Or at least that is what conservatives increasingly maintain. For example, Elon Musk said on a Joe Rogan podcast, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy (sic) exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.” Musk continued, “So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.” The concern is that empathy may lead to policies that conservatives don’t like concerning abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, illegal immigration, foreign aid, or helping countries attacked by others. Musk has promoted the book by the Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad, Suicidal Empathy, a term which Saad defines as a form of empathy that has a destructive potential. Saad’s seemingly serious book, along with writings of others, provides an intellectual framework for conservatives to be able to claim that their wish lists are not just about greed or self-interest. Instead, conservatives are heroically trying to preserve a culture that will be destroyed without their efforts.

Empathy, it now turns out, can be a sin because it can lead into accepting various other sins including abortion, LGBT+ rights, racial preferences, and illegal immigration, as Allie Beth Stuckey maintains in Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. (Illegal immigration may be harmful to the United States, but I don’t understand how immigration, whether lawful or not, is “sinful.” I haven’t found any mention of illegal immigrants in my Bibles.)

Sometimes the anti-empathy movement takes on misogynistic tinges. For example, after Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde urged President Trump at a church service to “have mercy” on immigrants and LGBTQ+ people and other disfavored groups, professor and pastor (yes, pastor) Joe Rigney, the author of The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits, wrote, “Budde’s attempt to ‘speak truth to power’ is a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation.” In addition, Christian nationalists have swung on to the anti-empathy bandwagon in their efforts to have a country dominated by white, straight “Christian” men.

Reading and hearing about the anti-empathic lead me, in a strange twist of mind, to thinking about how these conservatives are like Iranian censors, whom, presumably, these Americans abhor. Or at least that is what Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi demonstrates. This bestseller, published in 2003, is about the author’s experiences during the Iranian revolution of 1979 and its aftermath. The book is interlaced with stories from a group of seven women reading and discussing banned Western literary works led by Professor Nafisi.

Nafisi says about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, “You don’t read Gatsby to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.” That, of course, frightens those anti-empathetic American conservatives. They don’t want their rigid categories of right and wrong questioned.

Nafisi says that perhaps most worrying for the Iranian censors, similar to the concerns of the anti-empathy Americans, is that books might lead to a sympathy and understanding of those whom the Islamic officials despise and fear. Nafisi writes, “The respect for others, empathy, . . .is the quality that links Austen to Flaubert and James to Nabokov and Bellow.” Children with empathy are a threat; they may reject the rigidity of self-righteous adults. Nafisi writes, “This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compassion, without empathy.” Elsewhere she says, “Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to ‘see’ others, hence, to empathize with them.”

The censors wish to stifle the natural curiosity of children and others, afraid of the possible empathetic results that could lead to questioning the censors’ moral authority. And the conservatives wish to squelch empathy for similar reasons. But, as Nafisi says in Reading Lolita, “Humbert [Humbert] was a villain because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives, even about the person he loved most, Lolita. Humbert, like most dictators, was interested only in his own vision of other people.”

It is not really the specifics of the books that animates the censors’ actions. Instead, their fundamental concern is to prevent challenges to their rigid, authoritarian world view. And American conservatives opposing empathy similarly want to prevent challenges to their world view. It is in their view more important to accept conservative policies than to have empathy that can lead to questioning and challenging.

However, if empathy is now the new deadly sin as conservatives maintain, I want to adopt the words of the Reverend Micah Bucey of Greenwich Village’s Judson Memorial Church: “If empathy is a sin, sin boldly.”

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The Fifth Amendment and a Pardon

Dr. Anthony Fauci has been cited for contempt of Congress. He refused to answer questions at a hearing chaired by Senator Rand Paul, who is of the school of protesting too much (No, no, no. I am not obsessed with Fauci; in spite of my many statements that I want him behind bars, I am not seeking to put Fauci in jail, etc., etc., etc.). In the hearing, demon/saint Fauci said over a hundred times that, relying on the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, he would not respond to questions from the Senators. Paul responded that the Fifth Amendment did not relieve Fauci from answering because Fauci had received a pardon from President Joe Biden covering the topics addressed in the hearing. The contempt citation followed.

The Fifth Amendment states that “no person . . . shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” This provision is often referred to as the protection against self-incrimination. It has been interpreted to mean that the government cannot compel testimony that could be used in a criminal prosecution against the testifier. (The pleading of the Fifth is not an admission of guilt. A person can be charged and prosecuted without being guilty.) However, if there is no chance that the testimony can be used criminally against a person, the Fifth Amendment does not prevent compelled answers. There is the rub. Paul maintains that because of Fauci’s pardon, the devil/angel doctor’s answers cannot be used in a criminal proceeding against him because he cannot be prosecuted for the conduct prompting the committee’s questions.

Rand’s position contradicts the position of Trump, who has claimed that Biden’s pardon was not legal because it was signed by an autopen. However, given that the pardon is valid, its reach is limited. It cannot bar all possible prosecutions of Fauci. Often a person can be prosecuted for the same conduct in more than one jurisdiction. The crime can be simultaneously a federal crime and a state crime. It can simultaneously be a crime in more than one state. However, in our federal system, each jurisdiction has control over its own criminal proceedings. States cannot prevent federal prosecutions for the same conduct. One state cannot bar another state from prosecuting for the same conduct. And the federal government cannot prohibit state prosecutions. Biden’s pardon only prevents federal prosecutions. It does not bar any state from prosecuting. Fauci’s taking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination came from a valid concern about state prosecutions.

The possibility of state prosecutions of Fauci are quite real. Shortly after the hearing presided over by Senator Paul, Attorneys General James Uthmeier (Florida), John McCuskey (West Virginia) Liz Murrill (Louisiana), issued a subpoena to Dr. Fauci. They claim to be investigating whether he “profited” from the recommendations he gave during the Covid pandemic. If in their, I am sure, entirely neutral eyes he has done such a thing, state prosecutions can, and probably will, follow.

The Supreme Court has not discussed the interplay between presidential pardons and the right against self-incrimination, but it has addressed a related situation. Prosecutors and other government officials often desire the testimony of people who may both incriminate themselves and others. The government may be willing to give up the prosecution of one person in order to get a conviction of another. Think underlings in a criminal conspiracy or the getaway driver in a murderous robbery. In these situations, immunity can be given to the sought-after testifier.

That person may be given transactional immunity, which prevents the prosecution for any “transaction” testified about. If the testimony is about a murder, the testifier given immunity cannot be prosecuted for that murder. Because the person can’t be prosecuted, he can’t incriminate himself, and the jurisdiction can compel his testimony. Except, however, the multi-jurisdiction problem arises. A jurisdiction granting transactional immunity can bind itself not to prosecute, but it can’t bind other jurisdictions. If New York grants someone transactional immunity, the federal government or other states can still prosecute if the conduct violated their criminal laws.

The United States Supreme Court has addressed this multi-jurisdiction problem. It determined that a grant of immunity by one jurisdiction gives “use and derivative use” immunity in the other jurisdictions. Those other places can still prosecute, but they may not use the immunized testimony or anything derived from it in their prosecutions. Thus, the Court concluded, the right against self-incrimination is preserved because the compelled testimony or evidence garnered from it cannot be used in a criminal proceeding against the testifier.

The Court ruling on the multi-jurisdictional effect of immunity applies not just to prosecutors but to any government entity seeking to compel testimony. If a state commission or a legislative committee grants immunity to compel testimony, that grant acts as use and derivative use immunity in other jurisdictions.

A pardon is not the same as a grant of immunity. The purpose of an immunity grant is to compel testimony. The purpose of a pardon is not to obtain testimony but to relieve a person of consequences of a criminal conviction. It is not clear what the interplay is between pardons and the right against self-incrimination, and the Supreme Court has not addressed that situation. We don’t know if somehow a pardon in one jurisdiction results in use and derivate use immunity everywhere else. Thus, Fauci could not know whether his testimony could be used against him in a criminal proceeding.

Of course, if this drama really was about getting Fauci’s testimony to learn more about the origins of Covid-19 and not simply an effort to jail him, Rand Paul would have had a simple solution. The committee could have given Fauci immunity, which does not protect against perjury in the compelled answers. Why didn’t Paul do that?

There is another potential fallout from the Paul/Fauci stageplay. (Who is the devil and who is the saint in this drama?) If it is decided that because of the pardon, Fauci did not have a Fifth Amendment protection at the hearing, then the people Trump has pardoned also would not have a right against self-incrimination at a congressional hearing. If the Democrats control a House of Congress after the coming election, will they subpoena pardoned January 6 rioters to ask about the origins of the insurrection? If the goal is not really to learn more about those origins but to put the insurrectionists back in jail, they will not have to give immunity to those whom Trump has pardoned.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

Street parking increasingly requires us to go to one of those machines and buy a slip of paper with a time printed on it to put on the car’s dashboard. Aggravation ensues. In the “olden days,” parking meters were right outside the car. Drop a coin in them and walk away. Now I often have to walk half a block or more to the machine and then must walk back to put the slip in the car. Not a huge aggravation in the scheme of things, but still aggravating. I learned to be careful in placing the slip. Early on I carelessly tossed it “near” the windshield. It apparently did not display properly, and I got a ticket. With the old parking meters, there was always a chance that time remained on the meter at the spot where I pulled in. Then I might need fewer coins than I thought. It was not a huge joy when that happened, but it always made me feel at least a little bit lucky. But that happy moment is now gone. Or does anyone, when leaving a parking place, give the slip with time remaining on it to someone pulling into the spot?

Chalked on a sidewalk sign in Times Square: “Special. 2 drinks for the price of 2 drinks.”

Trump wants a slush fund so he can give money to his January 6 supporters who were supposedly prosecuted because of a “weaponized” Justice Department. This might seem like a less bad idea if the fund would give money to the Olympian erroneously arrested for damaging the reflecting pool. But what are the odds of that happening?

After I found the book I was looking for, I scanned another library shelf and saw The Hot Country by Robert Olen Butler. The jacket copy told me that it was the first in the series of Christopher Marlowe Cobb thrillers. I checked out the book and found that the fictional Cobb was an early twentieth century war correspondent. The book placed him on the eve of World War I in Mexico with its own complicated history of that time. I enjoyed the book and noticed that the jacket also proclaimed that Butler was a Pulitzer Prize winner. I assumed that he (like Cobb) had been a newspaperman and had won the prize for some reporting. Instead, I found that he had been awarded the Pulitzer for fiction in 1993 for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, a collection of short stories. Although I seldom read short stories, I was curious and got A Good Scent as an e-book from another library. Most of the stories are told in the first person by Vietnamese refugees living in the New Orleans area. When I told a friend about the book, she assumed that the stories were depressing, but no, they aren’t. Some go all the way to heartwarming, and all are wonderful. Serendipity worked out.

Because of the Democratic Socialists, conservatives are happy to sling “communism” and its variants as damaging epithets at all Democrats. I remember that Rachel Carson’s pathbreaking book Silent Spring was attacked by claiming that Carson was a tool of communism. Hmmmm.

“If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.” Satchel Paige, Rules for Staying Young.

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The Class of the Bar

          I was in a hole-in-the-wall, neighborhood bar. I had never been there before. I didn’t often walk in its direction, but on this day, I was passing it, saw empty seats at the bar, and stopped in. It almost immediately put me in a bad mood. At the biergarten where I often went, I not surprisingly got beer. This place had liquor bottles behind the bartender, and after toying with the notion of wine, I said, “Give me some sort of Scotch.” The barkeep held up a bottle and said, “Oban?” I replied, “It doesn’t have to be that good.” He then rattled off the names of three more single malts. Expensive Scotch is all they had. I took the Oban, but I was annoyed. I became more annoyed when I found, although this was a few years back, that it cost $20. I silently vowed that this would be my only visit to the nameless-to-me place.

          I sipped my drink and took out my book. I wanted to be out of there, but I also wanted to get my money’s worth. As my carefully-measured-to-make-sure-you-do-not-get-too-much-even-though-it-cost-two-sawbucks (does anyone say “sawbuck” anymore?) drink was nearing its end, a woman, gesturing at the stool on my right, asked, “Is anyone sitting here?” I replied that it was open, and she and another woman sat down. I only glanced at them. The one nearer me was perhaps late 30s and the other a few years younger.

          I returned to my Scarlett Thomas novel. The two women talked to each other. I did not hear their conversation, but after a few minutes, the one nearer me, Kris, I soon found out, said, “That’s a nice jacket,” and gingerly rolled some of my sleeve’s fabric between her fingers. I thanked her, not knowing what to make of the compliment. The jacket was an old Harris tweed. I had bought it fifteen years ago in a secondhand store. She went on to say that a tweed was always good. “You can wear it everywhere. You can wear it to a wedding.”

          We three started chatting. I asked what they did. The older one was the athletic director and soccer coach at a famous private school in Brooklyn, and the other was a PE teacher and lacrosse coach there. I joked, but I am not sure they realized that I was joking, that they must make a lot of money considering how much tuition their school charged. They quickly rejoined that they did not get paid much and not nearly what public school teachers get.

          I found out the older one was from Rhode Island, and she smilingly confirmed that everyone in the state not only knew each other but that almost everybody was her uncle. She told me that she went to Assumption College, and then added, “In Massachusetts.” The other one, Margaret or Maggie, said she was from Connecticut but was quick to add, “Northern Connecticut.” She had gone to Marquette University, and she had enjoyed Milwaukee.

          One of them asked about the tee shirt I had on under the Harris tweed. It had a circle on the chest with “73” on it. I said, “It’s the best number.” Margaret wanted to know why. I said that not only was 73 a prime number, its two digits are prime numbers, reversing the digits yields another prime number, and that 73 was the 21st prime number, and 21 was the product of 7 and 3. I said that I had learned this from Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory, who went on to give other noteworthy aspects of the number 73 that I no longer remembered. (I was surprised when I learned that 73 has its own Wikipedia page.) Margaret said that she did not know what a prime number was; Kris rolled her eyes and said, “A Marquette education.” (I was surprised about the professed ignorance since I thought that prime numbers were a basic part of education and a simple concept. A few days later, however, I was still reading the mystery/romantic/math book PopCo that I had in the bar, and I found the narrator’s grandfather saying, “No one knows very much about how primes behave, that’s the problem. Problems to do with primes have puzzled the greatest mathematicians.” Ok. I guess they aren’t that basic and simple after all.)

          Margaret said, “You must be smart.” I repeated that my 73 knowledge came from The Big Bang Theory. Kris said, “I figured 73 could not mean your age.” I replied, “It once was my age.” I was flattered that she said, “No way. I thought that you were 60 or something.” But my ego did not stay inflated long, for Kris soon labeled me “cute.” The inflection for this cute was not one announced about a boy band member or a young man or woman spotted in a bar or even for a puppy or a baby. No, this inflected “cute” was the kind used in conjunction with describing your great grandpa.

          The two told me that some of the students in their expensive private school acted entitled, but most were good kids and that no parent had unduly tried to influence them. I had asked about this both because of the then-recent scandals involving fake athletic credentials and college admissions and because I was told that a professional at a local squash club had been berated by a parent when the pro had moved a kid to a lower place in the club’s squash hierarchy. The parent, apparently, was worried that the demotion would harm the chances of the beloved and very special child going to some selective school.

          But, still, I thought to myself, even if my two new companions did not feel any overt pressures from the school’s parents, many of them most certainly are status conscious. Without consciously registering why—perhaps if I were a good psychologist, sociologist, or novelist, I would have the reasons–the two struck me with an aura of lower middle classdom that they had not completely transcended. It certainly was not their clothing because their dress fitted in well to a Brooklyn neighborhood bar where just about anything goes. I don’t think it was accents or speech patterns because nothing had stood out to me. It was partly from some of their comments. When Margaret stressed that she was from northern Connecticut, she was indicating that she did not want to be associated with what many see as the rich part of the state. Somehow the comment that my old Harris tweed jacket made good wedding apparel said something to me. But it was more than just a few comments. It was no doubt congeries of factors hitting me subconsciously that led me to the feeling of their social status.

          It made me feel a kinship with them because I, too, come from the lower middle class, or at least on a good day I did; right after the father’s payday, my childhood family might have made it all the way up there. I don’t think, however, that I now give the immediate impression that this is my origin. I wondered why and found that I was not sure of an answer.

          I did consciously change some of my mannerisms because of experiences at my expensive college. I found that my ties were not the right width and that it was acceptable to wear a blue Oxford button-down with a frayed collar and that some of my pronunciations seemed funny to others—e.g., the-ate-er. Some of my lessons caused me a bit more discomfort than others. For example, in my first year at college, I spent the night at the home of a very rich girl. Her grandfather had invented something essential for airplanes that had made a lot of money, and the house where I was staying was the grandest I had ever been in. I had hardly ever slept overnight in anyone else’s house before, and not surprisingly, I had not slept well in this one. The next morning when I wandered out bleary eyed, the mother pointed down a hall and told me to go to the breakfast nook and have something to eat. Maybe I had heard of a breakfast nook, but I had never before seen, much less eaten in one. No one else was there. I sat down on the bench seating. On the table was a box of cornflakes, one of my least favorite cereals, and a pitcher (certainly not a carton) of milk. I thought that I could get those dry, tasteless flakes palatable if I made them extra, extra sweet. The only other item on the table was a tiny, tiny bowl of a white substance with an even tinier spoon. It seemed odd that the sugar was in such miniscule container, but there it was. I scooped well into the double digits of the sugar onto my Kellogg’s. I was about to start eating when the mother returned and said, “I am so sorry. I forgot to put the sugar out.” Thinking as fast as I could, I put a spoonful of cornflakes into my mouth, chewed, swallowed, and said, “No problem. I don’t put sugar on my cereal.” It may have been the saltiest food I ever ate.

          But even if I came off as working class in a way that might have held me back when I was nineteen, I have shed that cloak. When I was an adult, my parents, however, reminded me in countless little ways of my less-than-upper-class origins. For example, I told my parents that I would be visiting them and that I would arrive in time for dinner. Hey, when do you eat dinner? I had forgotten that for my parents, dinner was the noon meal. I showed up five hours after they had the table set and the food prepared, which was, how shall I put it, a little dry by that point. Another example: The father was visiting us in Brooklyn. The parlor floor of our brownstone house had ceilings twelve feet high with plaster moldings and plaster rosettes that dated back to the 1870s. The father almost immediately after his arrival started explaining to me how I could lower the ceilings to a more sensible eight feet, a change that would save me much in heating costs. On the other hand, those interesting, pleasant women in that no-name-to-me bar seemed to retain a lower-middle-class aura. I realize that that made me feel superior to them, and I did not like that feeling. I have been lucky in so many ways. I was born into a time when social mobility in this country was real. Today, a child born into the bottom half of society has a much lower chance of moving out of that status than in almost any other developed country and much lower than when I was born. (You can look it up.) We still have a Horatio Alger myth, but it is a myth. The income gap is real, and the rich have insulated themselves and their families from invasion from the “unworthy.”

          My encounter with the two women in the bar led me to think about another young woman I met in a bar. She was tending bar, and her surname, she told me, was Dumas with the “s” pronounced, and I always addressed her by that last name. If you had asked me after I first met her, “Was she from the lower middle class?”, I would have said definitely not. But I could not have said what it was about her that led me to that opinion. I was not surprised, then, to learn eventually that her father was a doctor in South Carolina, where she grew up, her older brother was a partner in a prestigious law firm, and her younger brother was attending a top-tier law school. When I found out that she was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, I said, “Oh, you are one of those fucking smart women.” She paused, smiled, and replied, “Yes, I am one of those fucking smart women.”

          She may have been smart, but she did tell me that she had not read much since leaving Penn. I gave her my autographed copy of The Black Count: Glory, Evolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss, the Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the father of the author Alexandre Dumas. I told her that she ought to learn more about her ancestors. (She was as white as the snow that does not fall in Charleston, and I am not sure that she got the racial joke in the gift.) She stopped working in the bar shortly after I gave her the book, and I never found out what she thought of it or whether she even read the biography.

          Dumas was different from other bartenders and servers in the biergarten not only because she was an Ivy League graduate. Almost everyone who worked there had some sort of other career that they were pursuing—actor, videographer, music editor, writer, podcast comedian, lead singer in a covers band, Ph.D candidate, psychologist, potential bar owner, tour guide—but she mentioned no aspirations. This also made her different from the athletic director whom I met in the offended-me bar.

          Kris had mentioned that she had a master’s degree, but I did not get in what or from where, but when Maggie mentioned the book I had put down in front of the way-too-expensive Scotch, Kris said that she would like to read more books but that she did not have the time. Most people who claim to want to read and say they don’t have the time are really saying they prefer watching TV or listening to podcasts or searching for online videos or playing videogames in their leisure time rather than reading. They make the perfectly acceptable choice to do something other than crack a book.

          Kris, however, went on to say that in addition to her two jobs as athletic director and soccer coach that she was studying for a Ph.D. I was not familiar with the field — educational leadership — and I did not know the school–the University of New England. She was pursuing her degree online. When she got home at night, she turned to studying for that Ph.D. I asked if this was hard, and she spit out, “Oh, yes. It is a lot different and easier going to classes with lots of other people than it is sitting by yourself in front of a computer.” But she was determined to get the degree. She was determined to learn more; she was determined to educate herself and move up in the world.

          But the deck is stacked against her in ways that it was not for me. In this land of opportunity, opportunity is increasingly available only if you are “to the manor born.” In a better country, the strivers like Kris would make it to the head of the class. I hope she does.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

The World Cup made me thankful for foreigners. The soccer fans delighted in many of the quotidian aspects of American life that we often take for granted. It can be good to have fresh eyes looking at us.

I jokingly told my thrice-married friend that I would teach him all about women. He responded, “I know a lot about women. . . . I just don’t believe it.”

I learned at the bar trivia contest that the official state motto of Indiana is “The Crossroads of America.” That motto made sense to me. I have entered Indiana from the north, south, east, and west. Every time I continued driving straight through, wondering when I would get to the next state. I, however, have met nice, interesting people from Indiana. I met them all in New York or Pennsylvania.

I had forgotten the German-Turkish-American server’s name. She feigned, I think, that she was upset. I said, referring to the Mexican-American server/busboy standing next to her, “I have known him longer, and I forget his name, too.” She replied, “We call him Doughnut.” I looked at him and said, “Why is that?” He just smiled. She explained. “He went to a house of pleasure, and instead of giving out dollar bills, he handed out doughnuts.” The Colombian-American bartender clarified that the establishment was a strip club not too far away. The Mexican-American server/busboy had bought the doughnuts at a fancy neighborhood shop, and he had given them out to the strippers. He would not tell me what kind of doughnuts they were—I thought that they should have been Boston cream—but his English is limited, and he might not have understood the question. A few minutes later, however, he looked at me with his always sweet smile and said, “Now I am a VIP.”

The billboard from some sort of church warned “LUST DESTROYS.” And here I thought that lust led to the creation of new life.

At this time of year, I remember the country song lyrics: “There are two things money can’t buy: true love and homegrown tomatoes.”

When my young friend turned around, I could not help but notice the shiner under his left eye. Some guys tried to rob him as he got out of his car. A scuffle ensued. My friend adamantly maintained that he got in some good blows, but clearly, he also took one. The would-be robbers ran off when a shopkeeper came out of his store. My friend lost nothing. I commiserated with him and told him about various incidents involving me, the spouse, and the son. I asked him if his girlfriend had been with him. “No,” he said, but he saw her the next day. He said that she had been very sympathetic. He hesitated for a moment. A slight grin appeared—his first smile of the evening. Then he said, “Sympathetic sex is very good.”

A supposedly wise person once said, “Friends are people who dislike the same people.”

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A Different Supreme Court

Almost half of Americans think the Supreme Court decides cases based on the Justices’ political views while only 25 percent believe the decisions are based on the law. Polls indicate that 55 percent disapprove of the Court’s performance while only 41 percent approve. A large majority of Americans do not think Supreme Court Justices should have life tenure, and an even greater majority would like term limits for the Justices. These changes would require amending the Constitution, an unlikely possibility. However, other reforms that might improve both the Supreme Court and the perception of it do not require new constitutional provisions.

The Constitution does not define the number of Supreme Court Justices. It merely says: “The judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” Although the Constitution never expressly gives it the authority, Congress sets the size, which has varied from its original six until after the Civil War when it was set at nine, where it has stayed ever since. That number has seemed sacrosanct since FDR’s failed attempt to expand the Court in 1937.

The Court in the 1930s found many pieces of New Deal legislation unconstitutional. As Jeff Shesol reports in Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court (2010), the Supreme Court between 1933 and 1936 overturned congressional acts at ten times the historic rate, often using long- neglected doctrines and obscure Constitutional clauses to do so. Roosevelt then sought an expansion of the Court. Although Roosevelt gave varying nonpolitical reasons for his plan (What a shock! A politician being disingenuous!), the assumption was that he wanted more Justices so that he could appoint sympathetic people who would uphold legislation passed by Congress and signed by the president.

Roosevelt’s proposal was soundly defeated after much heated rhetoric about his threat to our constitutional government. While FDR’s plan failed by a resounding vote, in the long run he was the winner, and the Supreme Court and conservatives were the losers. Soon after the proposal to enlarge the Court was presented, the Court began to uphold New Deal legislation with logic inconsistent with its previous holdings. To many the Court seemed to be bending to political winds, and the perception of it as a partisan institution increased. The proposal to enlarge the Supreme Court did not put Roosevelt in a good light. However, it also focused attention on the Court whose questionable constitutional interpretations of the early 1930s became recognized as the overreach of biased judges trying to overturn legislation they did not favor.

Any suggestion since then to expand the Court has met with outcries that our constitutional way of life will be overthrown. Adding Justices only seems to be a partisan power play and not something that could improve justice, the Court, or the perception of the Court.

Current Court decisions–as has been true for much of our history–are seen not as neutral constitutional and statutory rulings but as the imposition of personal, political, and religious views of the judges and those who placed them on the bench. We can’t remove politics from Supreme Court decisions. All government decisions are political, and the Court is not immune. Writing about a famous case, legal scholar Fred Rodell said, “Both the plaudits and the deference, like the decision itself, and like every significant Supreme Court decision since, were and are rooted in politics, not in law. This only the ignorant would deny and only the naïve deplore.” This may be so, but that does not mean that we should just throw up our hands and accept a Court that is perceived as overly partisan and, in fact, may be so. Instead, in examining proposals for reforming the Supreme Court, we should seek ways to make it appear, and perhaps be, less politically biased and more politically neutral.

Merely expanding the Court is not a particularly good solution. If Democrats added more Justices when they had the power to do so, Republicans would do the same when they had the opportunity. Other proposals, however, offer institutional changes in the timing of Supreme Court nominations that, even though they would lead to a larger body, could possibly make the Court less partisan. I have not studied them all, but one plan intrigues me. This is not my own plan. I read this proposal, or one much like it . . . somewhere. I have searched for it, but so far have not found it again. I apologize for not giving proper credit to its initiator.

Here is the idea behind the proposal: Each president gets to appoint one Supreme Court Justice every two years, starting perhaps on the July 1 after the presidential term begins. The Senate, as the Constitution requires, would have to consent to the nominations. Of course, since Justices can sit on the Supreme Court until death or resignation, the Court could have an increasing number of judges, which could become unwieldy.

However, the entire enlarged Court need not decide all the cases. For example, the nine most recently appointed Justices could regularly render the Supreme Court decisions. The displaced Justices would move to a reserve status. Reserve judges would be available whenever one of the regular nine was unavailable for whatever reason such as illness or conflict of interest. If one of the regular nine died or resigned, the last regularly sitting justice would become one of the regular nine again until another Justice was appointed at the scheduled time.

An obvious question arises. Would this violate the constitutional provision that federal judges have life tenure? (The Constitution actually says judges “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour.”) I don’t think so. Judges who were appointed more than eighteen years ago and moved to the new reserve status would still hold office. Chief Justice Roberts in his nomination hearing said that he planned to judge like an umpire calling balls and strikes without his personal values affecting his decisions. So let’s stay with the baseball analogy. Nine players take the field, but the other players on the roster are available to come into the game if needed. The players on the field are in the major leagues, but those in the bullpen or in the dugout (I wanted to say, “on the bench.” Ha. Ha.) are also major leaguers and remain on the team. With this proposal, the nine Judges actively sitting on the bench (Oxymoron? Actively sitting?) are Supreme Court Justices, but those back in chambers waiting to be called upon would also be Supreme Court Justices, and they can stay in that office during good behavior.

With this proposal, judges would regularly decide cases for eighteen years. That eighteen-year period has advantages. Among other things, it would move the Court to the practice that it has had for most of its history. Before 1959, the average length of tenure on the Supreme Court was thirteen or fourteen years. Since 1959, it has been about twenty-five years. Current Justices have served longer. Clarence Thomas has been serving for thirty-five years; Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito have each served for over twenty years.

That eighteen-year period could also lead to an expanded pool of people considered for a nomination. Wanting to leave as long a legacy on the Supreme Court as possible, current presidents are not likely to appoint someone who is sixty or older. God forbid, that person might be on the Court for a mere twenty years! Find someone who is younger and expect a tenure of thirty or more years. Thus, Amy Coney Barrett, the last person appointed to the Supreme Court, went on the bench when she was forty-eight, and her two immediate predecessors on the Court, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, were fifty-three and forty-nine, respectively. Fifty-five is the oldest age at which any of the present Supreme Court Justices was appointed, and Clarence Thomas was only forty-three. Knowing, however, that the most active period of judging will be “only” eighteen years, a president can consider a wider range of age and experience for a nominee.

Another possibility: Instead of having the last nine appointed Justices regularly decide, nine Justices could be picked at random from all the Supreme Court judges. Many courts already operate this way. Intermediate appellate courts, such as the federal Courts of Appeals, have panels of three judges deciding a case but have more than that number sitting on that court. From the larger panel of judges, the requisite number are selected to resolve a case. For example, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has thirteen fully active judges, but normally only three decide a case. The court can, therefore, take on more cases and decide them more quickly. Similarly, a Supreme Court that had more than nine judges could consider more cases than it does now. If, for example, the Supreme Court had fourteen justices and nine decided each case, then the Court should be able to accept for review fifty percent more cases than it does now. Fewer Court of Appeals decisions, which are sometimes inconsistent from circuit to circuit, would stand as the final result as they do now. This could give more certainty, uniformity, and finality to the law.

This would also dampen lawyerly gamesmanship. Deadlines are in place to seek Supreme Court review. If they are not met, the lower court decision becomes final. So, for example, if a party has been ordered to pay $1million or to serve a twenty-year sentence, the money must be paid or the imprisonment served if the petition for Supreme Court review is not timely filed. The litigant cannot wait for a change in Court Justices hoping that they will receive a more favorable chance in front of a newly constituted Supreme Court.

Unlike individuals, some institutions can delay Supreme Court review until the time seems propitious. For example, assume the government has lost a case concerning some new scheme to avoid taxes and wants to seek redress from the Supreme Court. Government attorneys may believe that if they get immediate Supreme Court review, they will lose the case before the existing Supreme Court thereby allowing a precedent to be set that allows the scheme to be used by other taxpayers indefinitely. Instead, the government may decide not to seek review in hopes that the makeup of a future Court will be more amenable to its contentions. It may be better for the government to let that individual taxpayer keep the contested moneys to avoid a bad precedent and instead seek review with some other future taxpayer when the Court makeup is different. The government can take a longer view than an individual litigant.

Other institutional groups also try to “time” Supreme Court review. These institutions represent a cause that goes beyond an individual client. Prime examples are the NAACP or the ACLU, but this list now includes a host of conservative organizations as well. These advocacy groups often seek judicial review only when they assess the Supreme Court lineup as favorable to their position. With Barrett’s ascension to the Court, conservative legal organization have seen a solid majority favoring certain kinds of religious claims and Second Amendment expansion, and they now seek to get Supreme Court review of cases containing such issues that they might not have appealed if the Supreme Court lineup were different.

Such gamesmanship only furthers the notion that it is not truly the Constitution or the law that determines an issue, but the personal predilections of the Justices. The intrinsic merits of a legal argument may stay the same, but the likelihood of an outcome can vary depending on the timing of Supreme Court review.

That lawyerly calculus would change, however, if the nine Justices who heard a case were drawn from a larger pool, and the attorneys seeking review did not know who those nine would be. The addition of a single Justice to the Court would not be the momentous event it now often is. I don’t know for certain what result this would have on Supreme Court decisions and the perceptions of those decisions but could hope there would be more focus on the issues and less on the judges.

No matter the method for deciding cases, if there was a Supreme Court appointment every two years, the partisan games played by the Senate to deny consideration of Merrick Garland but force through the confirmation of Barrett should lessen if not end. Perceptions of the Court as a partisan body should drop. Perhaps Court performance will improve. And perhaps this might even lead to a more information-driven presidential campaign with candidates, knowing they will have two and only two nominations, revealing to the electorate who those candidates might be. Democracy, not just the Court, might improve.

Currently mere chance determines how many, if any, nominations the chief executive will have. Some presidents have a greater opportunity to pack the court with ideological bedfellows than others. With this reform all presidents would be treated the same. The appointments might be just as partisan as now, but the partisanship is more likely to be balanced and in sync with “the people” as we elect presidents. I am sure there are downsides to this proposal, but would it really be bad to treat all presidents equally?

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Paige Against the Machine and Term Limits

I recently attended a fundraiser at a friend’s summer home for Paige Cognetti. She is Mayor of Scranton and running for a seat in the House of Representatives from a district in Northeast Pennsylvania. She is styles herself an outsider as she did for the mayoralty and embraces the slogan, “Paige Against the Machine.”

The contest is in an important district because it is one of the increasingly rare ones where seats are not safe. Her opponent, first-term incumbent Rob Bresnahan, won by a few thousand votes, underperforming Trump who carried the district. Previously a Democrat held the seat, and the district had voted for the Democratic nominee in at least the last three previous presidential elections. 

Earlier in the day of the fundraiser she had held a press conference laying out an eight-point proposal as a basis for her campaign, and she repeated much of it that evening to the 70-or-so people crowded into the living room. Her bullet points did not address many issues that seem important to the electorate: affordability, healthcare, housing, immigration, Iran, the War Powers Act, assaults on science, assaults on free speech, assaults on fair elections. Instead, she has made “corruption” the center of her campaign, an issue on which her opponent seems vulnerable.

Although in his 2024 campaign Bresnahan said that he supported banning stock trades by congressional members, his accounts reveal prolific equities trading with some transactions apparently showing him benefiting from inside government knowledge. Not surprisingly, Cognetti proposes prohibiting Senators and Representatives from trading stocks while in office. She also seeks a long list of reforms. She hopes to prevent congressional members from serving on corporate boards, block their pay if they do not adopt a budget, ban corporate political action committees from contributing to congressional candidates, require audits of federal agencies (and require agencies to implement auditors’ recommendations), ban departing members of Congress from lobbying Congress, and ban members and their staff from betting in prediction markets on war, elections, and government activity. Cognetti, acknowledging the difficulty of adopting many of these reforms, says much of this will “take time” — an understatement.

Some of these reforms could be adopted by legislation, but many would need revisions of the Constitution. This raises another of her proposals: eighteen-year term limits for the Senate, House, and the Supreme Court. The only constitutional requirements for a Senator are to be  at least 30 years of age, a citizen for nine years, and an inhabitant of the state where elected. The only requirements for the House are being 25, seven years a citizen, and an inhabitant of the state where elected. (It is not a constitutional requirement to reside in the district where elected.) The Constitution imposes no other requirements for membership in Congress. One can even be a felon. One does not have to pass a mental, cognitive, or other competency exam. And one can be a member, according to the Constitution, even if one has already served eighteen years. The only time requirement is that a Representative serve for a two-year term while a Senator may serve for six. (The 1994 Republican “Contract with America” championed by Newt Gingrich proposed twelve-year limits for the House and Senate. A constitutional amendment to that effect received a majority in the House but not the constitutionally required two-thirds vote, and it died. The Contract limited congressional committee chairs to three two-year terms, but this did not require a Constitutional amendment.)

The Constitution does not list even minimum requirements to be a Supreme Court Justice. It does not say that a Justice has to be a certain age. It does not have a residency requirement. It does not say that a Justice must be a citizen. It does not say that a Justice has to be a lawyer. The Constitution does say, however, that all federal judges “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour,” which usually is interpreted as lifetime appointments. Term limits for the Supreme Court, therefore, would require a constitutional amendment. (The Constitution does, of course, impose a two-term limit for the president. That limitation came via a required constitutional amendment, the 22nd, adopted in 1951.)

Polls show that disapproval of the Supreme Court in recent years has rapidly increased. A 70% approval rating in 2020 has now dropped below 50%, with at least one poll showing only a 39% approval rating. Disapproval rates are consistently above 50%. The polls also show a strong desire for Supreme Court reform. Almost 70% desire the end of life tenure. Term limits are extremely popular, polling up to 83%. But because these reforms would require amending the Constitution, such Supreme Court reforms are not likely ever to happen.

However, next time I hope to discuss reforms that could be legislatively instituted that might improve the public’s perception of the Court and, perhaps, even improve its performance.

Posted on by rjonakait

Hamilton, Morgan, and Adam Smith

Our 250th anniversary has been used by various individuals and organizations to promote ideas and policies other than the celebration of our founding. For example, a recent piece in the Financial Times points out that since Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was also published in 1776, this is time to honor Smith’s ideas. Michael Strain, the author of “On America’s 250th, remember your Adam Smith,” maintains that both the Declaration of Independence and Wealth “prioritise liberty. In the Declaration,” he writes, “Jefferson argues that individual liberty is an inalienable right. Smith argues that prosperity is advanced when market activity is free and not unnecessarily constrained by big government, powerful monopolies, trade barriers or other limits on market competition.” Both, he asserts, have profoundly influenced the United States. “The ideas animating those documents — the importance of free people and free markets to human flourishing — have profoundly shaped America and the modern world.” The author is concerned that commitment to these ideas is now under “direct assault” in America.

The author misleads. While the Declaration has been a grand, aspirational document, Adam Smith’s ideas of free markets and the “invisible hand,” while often given token obeisance, have never been the driving force of the economy or of freedom in this country.

At the country’s inception, Alexander Hamilton laid out his economic ideas in his 1791 Report on Manufactures. His proposals, not Smith’s, became the driving economic philosophy for the United States both in the Eighteenth Century and well beyond the Civil War.

Hamilton was familiar with Adam Smith’s notions of free markets and the invisible hand, but Hamilton rejected them, at least for America. Smith encouraged free international trade. Hamilton, on the other hand, sought tariffs to raise government revenue but also to protect infant American industry. Hamilton also diverged from Smith by advocating government subsidies to industry. In addition, Hamilton encouraged what were then called “internal improvements,” what today would be labeled government spending on infrastructure. Hamilton favored not lesser government but a more powerful national state that would operate to give as much favoritism to businesses as it could.

In the Nineteenth Century, Hamilton’s ideas were incorporated into Henry Clay’s “American system,” although Clay sought even higher protective tariffs than Hamilton did. Abraham Lincoln admired and followed Clay, and Clay’s principles became founding principles of the Republican party. Its 1860 platform, in addition to opposing the extension of slavery, promised to increase tariffs, pass homestead laws (which, in effect, gave away federal land), and build a transcontinental railroad that depended on federal subsidies. These were not consistent with the ideas of Adam Smith.

More crucial to the country’s early economic growth than free markets were the internal improvements of the government. The prime early example was the Erie Canal, which transformed the American economic landscape. The goods and produce of heartland America now had an international outlet through the port of New York, making New York City the economic center of the country. triumphing over Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston. The canal, of course, was not the product of free enterprise, but of government, in this case New York State government. Railroads later became an economic engine, but the tracks for the intercontinental road, a product of Lincoln’s presidency, and other train routes were laid with federal government subsidies. After the Civil War, many tariffs increased to protect American industries, despite what Adam Smith wrote as desirable in Wealth of Nations.

The federal government interfered with free markets in another significant way in the decades before and after the turn of the Twentieth Century. Adam Smith believed that there should be a free market in labor. Whether that was achievable in his day is not clear, but it became increasingly difficult in the Gilded Age with the rise of massive corporations. These companies did not have to bargain with workers; they could dictate wages and working conditions — well, they could at least until the rise of labor unions, which put labor on a more equal bargaining footing with management. However, time and again, in a part of our history seldom taught, the government interfered in these “free” markets with military force suppressing unions and strikes.

A hundred years after Hamilton, another American economic giant rejected Adam Smith, the invisible hand, and free markets. Smith wrote before the industrial revolution. He posited that while companies would try to make more money than their rivals, competition would ensure that firms would level out and none would dominate the market. His ideas were formed when comparatively little capital was needed to enter a market, but his model of perfect competition did not exist with the rise of large-scale, capital-intensive enterprises after the Civil War. Then it became possible for a few giant firms to overcome competitive restraints and control significant portions of their markets. As Jean Strouse indicates in her massive and masterful biography Morgan: American Financier, J.P. Morgan, who helped shepherd the United States through several severe economic crises, saw competitive markets as inefficient and wasteful driving down the profits needed for necessary capital formation. In a process that came to be known as “morganisation,” Morgan eliminated “ruinous” price wars by combining rival companies into monopolies or cartels that controlled both prices, which could be increased, and wages, which could be reduced. Morgan insisted that the result produced greater industrial efficiency which led to greater national prosperity while leading–by coincidence, of course–to vast wealth for Morgan and other plutocrats. (Adam Smith did not foresee the vast power of the trusts and monopolies, but he did acknowledge, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”)

Any Smithian idea of a small government was destroyed in the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries as the American state grew and then grew some more. And the notion that free markets unencumbered by government have been our primary economic driving force is indefensible. There are legions of examples, but it is clear, for example, that special tax provisions for oil and real estate industries alone, but also for many other enterprises, have tilted capital markets. Many corporate and personal fortunes have been made or increased by government contracts in “markets” that would not exist without the large, modern state. And so on, and so on.

Indeed, it is striking that it is not Adam Smith but Alexander Hamilton who is again being invoked by present conservatives. J.D. Vance recently said, “American economic policy on the right is now much more Alexnder Hamilton that it is Milton Friedman.” Axios translates this to mean that “Vance believes the GOP’s intellectual center of gravity is shifting away from free markets to a more interventionist government that promotes domestic industry.” Welcome back Hamilton

Our 250th anniversary is not a time to bring back Adam Smith. Adam Smith has never been here.

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Snippets

I eat a lot of corn on the cob during the summer season, but I am confused about how to cook it. Every day I seem to get a computer feed announcing the best way to cook corn. Unfortunately, the advisors, always definitive sounding, do not agree. I should roast it in the oven with the husk on. I should roast it in the oven with husk off but brushed with olive oil. I should grill it wrapped in foil. I should grill it with the husk on. I should grill it with the husk off. I should boil it for four, eight, ten minutes. I should steam it for six, eight, ten minutes. I should drop the corn into a half inch of boiling water, bring it back to a boil, and cover it for two or three minutes. Whatever method I choose, many “experts” will say, it’s wrong.

A friend sent me a cartoon with an “updated” picture of Mt. Rushmore. It was now four presidents with the fifth image an equine patootie. That reminded me of an unpleasant experience last week. I was in my local Pennsylvania bar in a county that is split 50-50 red and blue. I was nursing my Barley Creek Summer Ale when Trump appeared on one of the four TVs above the square bar. I muttered, but not quietly enough, “That horse’s ass.” The guy next to me, whom I did not know, spun me slightly towards him, hauled off, and punched me in the nose. I did not go down, but my nose spouted blood and ran down my face and shirt onto the bar. My fellow patron stormed out. As I was wadding up paper napkins to shove up my nose, the bartender came over and started mopping up blood. I said, “I’m sorry. I should have realized that there would be Trump supporters in here.” “No, he is not a Trump backer,” the barkeep replied. “He’s a horse lover.”

As conservatives have done many times in our history, they are labeling opponents “communists.” Trump has been saying that candidates and officials on the Democratic side are communists who will destroy the country. Apparently, the country will self-destruct if the mayor of New York City gets his way, and New York owns a grocery store. Really??? If a city selling canned peas and red (not communist) potatoes is tantamount to destroying the country, we are incredibly weak, and perhaps we should change our national leadership posthaste. Instead, we should realize that municipalities have widely engaged in “socialism” without the republic collapsing. For example, in the Pennsylvania county where I spend part of the year, private companies handle the trash, supply the water, and furnish the electricity to many of the boroughs and towns. Free enterprise at work, perhaps. On the other hand, in the small town where I grew up, garbage was collected by city workers, and the water company was part of the municipal government. Both private companies and municipal entities provided electricity. I guess that in today’s terms my hometown would be labeled “communist,” but the city was in Wisconsin in the days of Wisconsinite Joe McCarthy, who had no trouble finding communists in closets, bedding, and conference rooms everywhere. Even so, Tailgunner Joe did not label Sheboygan communist. And even if he had, the country has survived this brand of socialism and similar ones in towns and cities across the country. Some people even think that servicing the populace is one of the roles of government! I take no stand on whether Mamdani’s grocery store is a good idea, but, no; I don’t think it jeopardizes the stability of the country.

Stephen Kinzer reports in The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (2013) that Secretary of State Foster Dulles, who considered himself a devout Presbyterian, said, “There are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who are Christians and support free enterprise, and there are the others.”

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First Sentences

“I grew up on gangster stories.” Rich Cohen, The Last Pirate of New York: A Ghost Ship, a Killer, and the Birth of a Gangster Nation (2019).

“The headquarters of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, occupies an imposing edifice of concrete and green glass on the south bank of the River Thames, in London.” Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth (2026).

“’The English language,’ observed Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘is the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.’” Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeill, The Story of English (1986).

“Some Buddhists might say that to write a biography of Siddhatta Gotoma is a very un-Buddhist thing to do.” Karen Armstrong, Buddha (2001).

“As a child, I had a number of strong religious beliefs but little faith in God.” Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (1994).

“It seemed an unlikely choice, this large establishment in the financial district, so I stood outside and checked the address, the name of the restaurant, I wondered if I had made a mistake.” Katie Kitamura, Audition (2025).

“’The Jew is being legislated out of Russia,’ Mark Twain wrote in Harper’s Magazine in 1898.” Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn (2016).

“Old Lanscombe moved totteringly from room to room pulling up the blinds.” Agatha Christie, After the Funeral (1953).

“The economy is the grandest collaborative project in human history.” Alex Mayyasi, Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life (2026).

“Sometimes a flare goes up and you get to see exactly where everyone is standing.” Douglas Murray, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization (2025).

“Evel Knievel was never a very skilled daredevil, but that was part of his charm.” Jeffrey Toobin, The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy.

“Fascism was the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain.” Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism.

“They came for her in late August, on the island of Corsica.” Daniel Silva, The English Girl (2013).

“Just months after being paroled from Massachusetts state prison, where he had recently finished serving a seventeen-year sentence for kidnapping and attempted extortion, Louis Royce, now well into his seventies, walks easily through the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.” Stephen Kurkjian, Master Thieves: The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World’s Greatest Art Heist