WELCOME to the debut of “The Truth Is!”, a blog of reporting and commentary that aims to be informative, thoughtful and provocative. At least initially, the blog will have a strong heartland flavor by virtue of the connection of a number of us to Cowles family journalism. I am former editor of the Des Moines Register’s opinion pages. Another contributor, Michael Gartner, is former editor of the paper; he later served as president of NBC News. Another former Register editor who has agreed to contribute, Geneva Overholser, is director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg school of journalism. Followers of the blog will have access also to the work of Herbert Strentz of Des Moines, a close Register and other newspaper watcher who once headed Drake University’s journalism school. Bill Leonard, a longtime Register editorial writer, will add insights.

“The Truth Is!” will be supervised by my daughter, Marcia Wolff, a communications lawyer for 20 years with Arnold and Porter (Washington, D.C.). Invaluable technical assistance in assembling and maintaining the blog is provided by my grandsons Julian Cranberg, a college first-year, and Daniel Wolff, a high school senior.

If you detect a whiff of nepotism in this operation, so be it. All of it is strictly a labor of love. —Gil Cranberg

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Gilbert Cranberg: THREE CHEERS FOR JOHN PAUL STEVENS


Retired Supreme Court justices don’t customarily second-guess their former colleagues. Former high-court justice John Paul Stevens, who retired in 2010, broke with custom the other day when he wrote a searing critique of the court’s decision to invalidate the Voting Right’s Act’s requirement that states with a history of bias in voting had to obtain Justice Department approval of changes in their voting laws

Stevens registered his disapproval in a book review in the Aug. 15 issue of the New York Review of Books. The book: “Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy” by Gary May.

The New York Review of Books has a small but elite readership. If Stevens wanted deliberately to provoke a storm, he’d have run his piece in the New York Times or the Washington Post, but the book review he wrote was sufficiently hard-hitting and out of the ordinary that it is bound to be noticed.

Among other things, Stevens accused Chief Justice John Roberts of selectively quoting history in his majority opinion for the court. “Nothing that happened before the 1890s is even mentioned in Roberts’s opinion for the court,” chided Stevens, noting it was in those years the Ku Klux Klan was organized and other measures flourished to deny blacks access to the ballot box. And he unfavorably compared Roberts’s description of Mississippi racial history to the more complete factual record included in Justice Abe Fortas’s opinion in the earlier voting rights case of United States v. Price.    

Should retired justices stick to their knitting and leave commentary about the court’s work to law professors and other academic critics? It would be a shame if the unique insight and perspective of a retired justice is withheld from public discourse for no better reason than custom. The public debate has been enriched by John Paul Stevens’s willingness to speak his mind.





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