Diane Rehm - Please Retire

I am a long time NPR listener and routinely tune in to the Diane Rehm show primarily due to the quality of the quests she is able to attract. Over the last year, a significant number of her guests were invited to discuss financial and economic issues. Ms. Rehm's questions are frequently circutious and she explored popular prespectives almost exclusively. In my opinion, she is not comfortable with basic economic theories, the financial products (MBS, CDO, CDS, etc.) and industry practices that contributed significantly to the financial crisis. She missed numerous opportunities to ask probing questions which could have helped educate even the average listener on government policy and options for legislation.

However, what prompts me to write this entry is that I have listened to Ms. Rehm in two recent shows push her personal view that non-lawyers should be adppointed to the Supreme Court. The two shows were her interview with Justice Breyer and her discussion with panelists of cases on the 2010 Supreme Court docket. Her argument in support of appointing non-lawyers is that the Supreme Court should "represent a great variety of thinking, not just lawyers". I consider her point to be simplistic, insipid and not well thought out. The only thinking that is appropriate for a Supreme Court Justice is legal thinking. Justices need to have a detailed understanding of the Constitution, resources which illuminate the intent of the Constitution such as the Federalist Papers and detailed knowledge of case law decided by the court. The court needs to objectively make decisions based on the Constitution and case law and nothing else. If non-judicial thinking and personal experience were the basis of Supreme Court decisions, the court would become partisian and the decisions would not form a basis for a continuation of legal thought. If people without the requisite legal background, regardless of how much they know about other subjects, were justices, the opinions of the court would come to be seen as arbitrary and capricious and precedents would be routinely overturned such that no person or firm could rely on the legal opinion of their attorney in making decisions. I feel sorry for the mother who has lost her son to gun violence but this experience has no place in determining a 2nd amendment issue and I say this from a personal perspective of believing that easy access to guns is a problem and don't want a gun in my house. The Supreme Court should not be basing their decisions on their assessment of the impact or benefit to society at large as this is the job of the legislators. Do we really want Joe the Plumber voting on the court? It may sound fine to argue that common sense is a valid basis for a legal opinion but consider that one person's common sense is another person's folly. The Court should make legal interpretations and that requires someone well versed in the law. No, I am not a lawyer and generally agree with Shakespeare on the value of lawyers.

The host of a talk show must have some understanding of the topics being addressed in order for the show to be informative and Ms. Rehm is seriously lacking on the more serious topics which she is increasingly addressing. Perhaps she should stick with book interviews and other lighter topics.