Justice John Paul Stevens is retiring after a 35-year run on the Supreme Court.  He probably should retire because he is 100 years old, and because he wears a bow-tie without trying to be ironic.   

For some reason, people in America get very excited when a Supreme Court seat is going to come open.  For about 70 percent of the country, this reason is that the seat represents the potential that Roe v. Wade would be overturned, even though it will not.  This is important to that 70 percent of people because about 90% of those people have the mistaken belief that such an outcome would make abortion illegal.  Roughly half of the people who don’t understand Federalism think such an outcome would be the bees knees, while the other half believe it would be akin to throwing all women in prison.  Unfortunately for the 30 percent of the country who don’t care, this longstanding confusion allows for the election of such luminaries as George W. Bush.

While abortion is a tricky issue that is prone to more hyperbole than gay marriage, it is basically a non-starter, and something that exists to be exploited by politicians of both parties who will never do anything about it, regardless of what doing anything about it would mean for their respective constituencies.  For all of these reasons, and a lot of others, I’m not remotely interested in the abortion debate.   What I’m more interested in is how the abortion debate causes television reporters, politicians and average citizens who have never taken chemistry to reference a chemistry lab experiment every 15 seconds throughout the confirmation process.

That chemistry test is of course, the “Litmus test” which in political circles refers exclusively to the idea that a liberal would never vote to confirm a judicial nominee who would overturn Roe. V. Wade and a republican would never vote for one who’d support it.  The term first appears as soon as the president mentions the pending vacancy.  If he is a conservative President, he makes an opaque reference to his disdain for “activist judges” who brought about such things as equality of race and sex.   If he is a liberal, he mentions how he wants someone who is “thoughtful” which is liberal code for “a woman, probably a woman who is a minority”.  Regardless of the position, however, both sorts of Presidents are required to say that they would never have a “Litmus test” in place for their nominee.   

Once the President selects a candidate, he or she promptly goes to Capitol Hill.  The media calls this “making the rounds” a process which requires TV footage of the nominee having an awkward conversation with John McCain who is sitting with his hands on his thighs, gritting his teeth.  This part of the process usually goes pretty well unless the nominee is Harriet Miers in which case it is quickly determined that you were nominated because you are the president’s neighbor.

Once it is clear the nominee has never grown pot, or written any memoranda supporting segregation 20 years after it was eliminated (unless you are William Renquist and you can blame the memorandum on someone else) they will go before hearings.  At these hearings, the 300 or so members of the judiciary committee get to ask questions of the candidate.  Mostly they use this time to talk about themselves, and then to hammer on isolated cases their aides have identified, or in the case of John Roberts, to gush over how well he knows the law, even though he looks like he is 11 years old.

The Litmus test plays prominently during these hearings because all members of the committee begin their remarks by stating they do not have such a test, but then spend most of their time trying to get the nominee to say whether or not they support Roe v. Wade (one assumes, because it will be easier to conduct a Litmus Test with this information, assuming they change their mind and conduct one).

In high school, I actually performed several litmus tests, in actual science classes. I don’t recall what they were for but I remember that it involved dipping a piece of paper into dish with some chemicals and having it turn blue, or possibly red.  I think it was used to determine whether something was acidic or basic, which had some kind of significance, possibly having to do with shampoo.  I assume whoever invented this test would be pissed to know that it has been hijacked for use in the second most annoying political cliché behind “up or down vote” but maybe I’m wrong.  Perhaps his vision was always to create an overused political metaphor and he’s been laughing at 11^th graders testing shampoo ever since.