The Roberts Charade

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I managed to listen to a half-hour of the Roberts’ hearings this morning before shutting it off. What’s the point? The man will quite obviously vote to overturn both Roe and Casey—anyone believing otherwise, or failing to catch the significance of his comparing Roe to the Court’s pro-segregation decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, is engaging in wishful thinking here. As Bruce Ackerman pointed out way back in February, Antonin Scalia also told the court: “I assure you I have no agenda. My only agenda is to be a good judge.” Blah blah.

So I’m not quite sure what the whole point of dancing around this issue is, with Arlen Specter trying to find ever more clever ways to get Roberts to signal his views on Roe and Roberts finding ever more clever ways to avoid it. Are we all really supposed to pretend to be fooled here? Meanwhile, I don’t quite see why Roberts even bothers with this dance: why not just say, “Yes, I pretty much think Roe is settled law?” and then overturn it (or narrow it considerably) when he gets a seat on the Supreme Court? It’s not like anyone will impeach him for misleading people at the confirmation hearings. At any rate, William Stuntz had the right idea last week when he argued that hearings for Supreme Court nomination should just be abolished. They won’t, of course—Senators need someplace to grandstand—but going through a process defined by how telegenic the nominee looks and how well he or she can avoid giving any useful information whatsoever seems pretty pointless. The only information gleaned from these hearings is that Roberts is articulate, and seems to be an even-tempered guy, two qualities which are totally irrelevant to working as a Supreme Court Justice.

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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