Bipartisan legislation introduced in the Senate would require, in a breach of Supreme Court convention, televising the oral arguments in the Obamacare hearing; the senators pushing the bill do so in the name of transparency.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., introduced a bill yesterday to “require television coverage of all open sessions of the Court, unless the Court decides, by a vote of the majority of justices, that doing so would constitute a violation of the due process rights of one or more of the parties before the Court.”
Grassley intends the bill specifically to allow for video of the oral arguments in the Obamacare hearing. “[N]ext year, the Supreme Court will hear arguments about a law [Obamacare] that has the potential to impact every American,” he said in a statement. “Allowing cameras in the Supreme Court will help bring much needed transparency to a process that is largely unknown to the American public.”
Durbin was even more critical of the Supreme Court in his comment on the legislation. “For too long the American public has been prevented from observing open sessions of the Supreme Court,” the Senate Majority Whip said. “As the final arbiter of constitutionality, the Supreme Court decides the most pressing and often most controversial issues of our time.” He added that “there can be no valid justification for such a powerful element of government to operate largely outside the view of the American people.”
Justice Antonin Scalia argued recently, during a Senate Judiciary hearing, that the telivision of oral arguments would distort the public perception of the Court, because the arguments would be reduced to soundbites on the nightly news.
