There’s a truly excellent Tim Walz tweet circulating (thanks, Sal Gentile!) about all the things the Minnesota governor will do for you if elected vice president. It includes fixing your carburetor and putting a new chain on your lawn mower (read all the replies, I beseech you), and the upshot is that the former high school civics teacher and football coach is not just a menschy guy who will bring over a hot dish without even being asked but also a regular human who lives in the world. He doesn’t so much have an IVF “policy” as have an IVF daughter. His daughter is in fact the reason he changed his views on guns, in order to work more aggressively to prevent gun violence. Walz is not so much a creature of law and policy as a first responder. And, as People magazine put it when he was tapped Tuesday, Walz thus becomes the first candidate on a Democratic White House ticket since Jimmy Carter ran for reelection in 1980 to not have attended law school. The first nonlawyer in more than 40 years!* In a year in which the Democrats are putting the Supreme Court on the ballot, that makes him perfectly positioned to talk about what the court has done to ordinary Americans and why it matters.
In recent days alone, one sitting justice of the Supreme Court, in an interview with Fox News Sunday, cautioned President Joe Biden—kinda mobbishly—to “be careful” about proposing reforms that include imposing enforceable ethics rules (something all other judges in America must abide by). Justice Neil Gorsuch did this just as the New York Times reported on yet more undisclosed and unreported luxury travel by one of Gorsuch’s colleagues. In a new letter from Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, of Oregon, we learned that Justice Clarence Thomas took a round-trip flight from Hawaii to New Zealand in November 2010 on Harlan Crow’s private jet but never disclosed it. As the Times points out, Thomas’ disclosure form for 2010 does not list any flights on Crow’s jet, and while he has recently amended other filings to account for luxury travel after the press has unearthed it, this form has never been corrected.
To briefly review, then, the same Supreme Court conservative supermajority that last month granted Donald Trump almost boundless immunity from criminal prosecution and in June took away the government’s power to ensure that water is clean and food and drugs are safe has opted to respond to criticism with yet another warning to “be careful” in even contemplating creating rules, an admonishment that comes alongside yet another brutish shrug from Thomas at the very existence of enforceable ethics guidelines. It’s a foolhardy response to a public that has, according to polling, lost all confidence in the court—but it’s not unremarkable from a branch that sees itself as floating above all law and regulation. As Svante Myrick aptly puts it, this lack of public confidence is about not merely what’s on the docket but the horse it rode in on: “It’s not just the rulings, it’s the recreational vehicle.”
So when Gorsuch and Thomas opt to spend their summers giving the middle finger to an American public that supports ethics reform and term limits by overwhelming margins (73 percent and 74 percent, respectively) while labeling such measures to be interference with “judicial independence,” that is certainly a choice. It’s just an objectively dumb one. And in that sense, finally having a nonlawyer on the ticket to speak to what the court has done to ordinary Americans in these few short years is both vital and long overdue.
If we have learned anything at all this year, it’s that far too many lawyers are far too timid and too institutionalized to be comfortable calling out the raft of bad decisions in which precedent is ignored, statutes are misread, and text and history are warped in order to achieve partisan political goals. It’s time to pass the torch.
And if that means that a former civics teacher can take us all to school and, in layman’s terms, about the urgent issues on which Americans can agree the court has screwed us all, well, his timing is perfect: The Supreme Court as currently constituted has eviscerated voting rights. Tim Walz has been a fervent proponent of expanding the franchise. In his first remarks this week as vice presidential candidate, Walz pledged that he and Kamala Harris would strive to create “a place where we settle our political differences not through violence but with our votes.” Americans overwhelmingly believe in democracy over authoritarianism.
The Supreme Court has just gutted abortion rights. Walz has consistently expanded them. The Supreme Court has worked persistently to dismantle public education in favor of sectarian religious schools. Walz has poured a lifetime of energy into bolstering public education. The high court has put lethal guns in the hands of violent Americans. Walz says he “sleeps just fine” with his F rating from the National Rifle Association. The list goes on.
On almost every signature issue Walz brings to the table as governor, the Supreme Court has worked to undermine and devalue public regulation, funding, and expertise. And as our friend Jay Willis keeps reminding us, you need not be an expert on constitutional law and methodological approaches to statutory interpretation to have informed opinions on the Supreme Court. You know who’s going to have informed nonlawyerly opinions on what’s wrong with the Supreme Court? The nominee for the vice presidency. And if the current justices of the Supreme Court believe that the law has no bearing on the ways in which they opt to live their lives, and if the current GOP front-runner for the presidency has lived his entire existence in that very same spirit, well, it may be useful to have someone in the race who not only is palpably and demonstrably affected by the law but can also speak to that in terms the rest of us can relate to and understand.
In a profound way, Walz is an avatar for someone who is attempting to do effective and lawful state governance and is being thwarted by an imperial Supreme Court, which is exactly what will happen to the Harris administration if court reforms are not enacted. Just as the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority stood in the way of Biden’s emergency COVID management, his air-pollution efforts, his college-loan-forgiveness program, and his emergency-room abortion-care regulations, it will joyfully throw a spanner into the Harris administration’s efforts to expand voting rights, protect LGBTQ+ Americans, and prevent climate crises. One doesn’t need Juris Doctor behind their name to call this out. One need only have had a semester or two of high school civics to understand that this is neither “checking” nor “balancing” as anticipated by the Framers but rather an untouchable juristocracy that travels by charter flight and superyacht.
It’s high time that a prominent nonlawyer take a turn at this critique of the Roberts court, and it’s clear that Walz may succeed where all of us polite eggheads have failed. The Supreme Court supermajority represents a democracy crisis that needs to be discussed at barbecues and high school lunch tables, not just pondered in the stacks at Ivy League law schools. If Walz can initiate and embody that conversation over the next 90 days, in terms that chime with swing voters and undecideds, and in language that is playful and irreverent and goofy, it will be the best thing to happen to a Democratic Party that has avoided the topic of court reform for two decades too long. To baldly paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, three generations of pointy-headed lawyers is enough. Let’s have a conversation on court reform from someone who has lived, and taught and governed, under the hand of a court that seems not to care about the real impacts of its decisions.
Correction, Aug. 7, 2024: This article originally misstated that it has been a quarter century since a nonlawyer appeared on a Democratic White House ticket.