When Online Politics Made It to the High Court
BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, February 10 2010
This is a bit dated in blog-time, but hey, the snowy east coast is reason enough to pause, reflect, and dig back into things that happened weeks ago. Someone intimately involved with the Prop 8 case happening out in San Francisco makes the case that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's dissent on the question of whether that trial should have been broadcast marks the very first time in the history of the United States Supreme Court that an online organizing action was specifically cited in a high court opinion. Here's Breyer:
The court initially relied on a provision in the United States Code that permits District Courts to prescribe rules “without public notice and opportunity for comment” “[i]f the pre- scribing court determines that there is an immediate need for a rule,” and if the court “promptly thereafter afford[s] such notice and opportunity for comment,” [bunch of legal stuff, yadda, yadda.] Then, on December 31, the court revised its public notice to ask for comments directly. By January 8, 2010, the court had received 138,574 comments, all but 32 transmitting the proceedings.
Those 138,574 comments, give or take, came mostly as the result of an organizing push that groups like the Courage Campaign, based in California, took part in -- which goes to explain in part why the comments that poured in ran 4000-to-1 in favor of broadcast the marriage trial's proceedings, which the Supreme Court came down somewhat more closely, at 4-to-5. Interesting that Breyer didn't cite the source of the Hussein-ian numbers. (Interesting too, is that pro-same-sex marriage backers' success in organizing here is somewhat the opposite of the dynamic during the Prop 8 battle itself, where the advocates of the proposition out hustled, out organized and messaged those folks who wanted to ban same-sex marriage in California.) But it does mark some sort of moment in time that a people-powered political push organized almost entirely online makes its way into an argument in the highest court in the land.
The gauntlet has been thrown. Has your online political action reached the status of inclusion in a Supreme Court opinion, or does this deserve the honor -- the historic honor -- of being deemed the first time digital politics on a mass scale has become a point of argumentation for the nine in black? By all means, let us know.