Thy Kingdom Come!
Alito in, SCOTUS wars done for now
Last Tuesday, I tuned in to C-Span in mid-morning just in time to catch the final roll call vote on Justice Sam Alito's confirmation to the Supreme Court of the United States (or SCOTUS, as judicial nerds in the blogosphere like to call it). It provided a certain degree of closure to a very long story that has been unfolding since about the time I began blogging in the summer. Justice O'Connor announced her retirement on July 1, I believe, and now seven months later, we have not only a new associate justice, but a new chief justice successfully seated on SCOTUS. Time will tell how they will administer justice and interpret the Constitution (shall I call it COTUS?), but there is good reason to be hopeful. In this, if in nothing else this year, the President (aka POTUS!) has been a success. His two SCOTUS appointees from this year will be on the Court long after current budget debates, energy prices, and even troubles in Iraq are ancient history.
Most interesting in all this was the way in which the threatened filibusters fizzled out. Roberts got through with a fair measure of bipartisan support, and when the blue-state Democrats made a last-ditch show of a filibuster of Alito, it only made them look rather silly. This was somewhat reassuring and surprising to those, like me, who had disliked the compromise reached by the "Gang of 14" last summer. I'd have preferred, at that time, the rules change known as the "nuclear option" to end the judicial filibustering, but it turns out that a good number of Democrats eventually realized that this wasn't a winning issue for them.
Two justices in seven months is more than I'd have hoped for last year. Nonetheless, the Court could certainly use a few more Alito-esque additions. Most conservatives can't help wondering how much longer Justice Stevens can possibly go on--and replacing him, of course, would really put Roe v. Wade in jeopardy. All of this makes upcoming midterm elections quite significant; it seems clear that the Democratic Senate minority is hesitant to filibuster SCOTUS nominees, but it would certainly change things were there to be a Democratic majority. And of course, if there is really a chance that a nominee would definitively tip the scale against Roe, one can expect an outcry beyond what we've ever experienced. All in all, the past several months have been less contentious than I expected--but the biggest battles are still to come.
Thy Kingdom Come!
Mundelein Seminary Shootout
I am back (have been for several days now) from a nice trip last weekend. As I have for the past two years, I joined about ten other seminarians from Kenrick to attend one of the annual basketball tournaments that bring together seminaries from around the country. (I should here make it clear that while I love to play in these tournaments, I am far from being a great basketball player. My biggest contribution is usually cheering from the bench, which I duly did--my voice is still recovering.) The two most significant such tournaments in the Midwest are at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, OH (where we went the last two years) and at Mundelein Seminary near Chicago, where we went this past weekend. Ten different teams attended, and there was a very full schedule of competition which began shortly after we arrived on Friday evening.
The tournament functioned by double elimination, which was comforting after we lost our first game against St. Joseph's college seminary after having led most of the game. Saturday morning, we started off at 9:15 with an overtime win against St. Meinrad Seminary. After a small Mass with Fr. Paul Rothschild, who had accompanied us from Kenrick, followed by lunch and a tour of the stately neo-classical campus of Mundelein, we proceeded to a 2:15 game against Conception, which we also won. Our third game of the day, at 5:15, matched us with St. Paul Seminary from St. Paul, MN. By this point, the fatigue of a long day of playing was beginning to catch up to us, and we struggled throughout most of the game to keep from falling too far behind. In the end, we pulled to within six points with a few minutes left, but didn't quite have enough to pull it out.
Had we beaten St. Paul, we would have then had to play a fourth game that day, in order to qualify for Sunday morning's championship. So instead we had to be content with a .500 record, and went out for some good Italian food. Sunday morning, for the first time since I had been a seminarian, Kenrick wasn't playing in the championship game, so were able to make an early departure after a very nice 8 AM Mass in the Mundelein chapel (which still has the steps of the sanctuary marked with the names of the Minor Orders in Latin).
We found the Mundelein tournament to be significantly tougher than that at the Josephinum, where we had finished first and second in the last two years. It was nice, however, to visit a seminary I had never been to before, especially one with as large and elegant a campus as Mundelein has. Whether it can be called, as one brochure we saw said, the "premier theological seminary in America" is certainly open to dispute :), but it is certainly a beautiful place, and I was glad to be able to connect there with other young men from other places, following the same call to the holy priesthood.
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