18 August 2006

Taylor Made

Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of Detroit is enjoying her fifteen minutes of fame this morning. She is turning the millstones of justice out in the Heartland, grinding up the government's contention that it can sort through the sea of calls and messages to identify those who wish to destroy us.

There are partisans on both sides of the matter. I have a pal who is still part of the apparatus, and he says the program, in that he can talk about it, is strictly limited and under control. Other people bridle at the continued erosion of the rights that make us a unique and open society.

I tend that way myself, but taken with the revelations from the UK about plots against airplanes, I waver a bit in my fierce commitment to individual rights, or at least other people's rights.

Maybe it is eight minutes of fame, since her decision against the NSA electronic surveillance program had to compete with a pedophile's revelations about an old murder in Bangkok.

The media went nuts about the latter, even though it duly noted the former. It is like the Michael Jackson affair, and he is even further away than the monster in Thailand.

When last seen, the King of Pop was in one of the Gulf Emirates, wearing a burkha, presumably to provide protection against the powerful rays of the sun.

The whole thing makes me queasy. John M. Karr is the pedophile of the moment, who was the main event in a carnival in one of my favorite cities, which has become a magnate for expats with curious and repellent tastes. Mr. Karr said he was with JonBenet when she died, which is so creepy that I turned off the television before they could show the even creepier picture of the little girl with all the make-up.

I missed the follow up on Judge Taylor in the media circus about the freak shows. In serious journalism, the electronic surveillance program was outed by the vigilant reporters of the The New York Times last December. The Times went on to out the Treasury Department's efforts to track terrorist funding, and had apparently appointed itself as an adjudicator of national security issues. They have taken a lot of heat for that, and perhaps they have determined that interpreting the law might best be left to the lawyers.

Accordingly, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit in January on behalf of the usual suspects, which includes journalists, fellow-travelers, and members of organizations that have frequent contact with the Middle East. The suit was filed in the Eastern District of Michigan, a place I drove through this week, marveling at the husk of the great city of Detroit.

I am not saying the ACLU went shopping for justice by picking the venue. That is part of the game, after all. But the suit wound up in the lap of Anna Diggs Taylor, senior judge for the Eastern District.

Taylor was the first African-American woman appointed to the Michigan federal bench, and later became chief judge for the Eastern District.

She has an interesting history, and one that brought this case to her as if by destiny. She was a child of the African-American middle class of Washington DC, born in the Depression year of 1932.

Her family sent her to the Northfield School for Girls in Massachusetts, and later Barnard College. She entered Yale Law School as one of only five women in her class. She was on scholarship, and graduated in 1957.

Despite the credentials, she could not find a job in the private sector, and had no alternative but to throw herself into the government. She worked in the Department of Labor as a solicitor for J. Ernest Wilkins, a former associate of her father, and the first African American to hold a sub-cabinet post in the United States government.

In 1960, she married legendary Congressman Charles Diggs and moved to the Motor City, where she was an assistant DA for Wayne County.

The real baptism of fire for the future judge came in 1964, when she went down to Mississippi as part of Freedom Summer. She got there the day after James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner disappeared.

The young men were already dead and buried in a pit at the Old Jolly Farm outside Philadelphia, murdered by local segregationists, but that was not known for more than a month. A pall of fear hung over the South.

When Taylor and other attorneys inquired about the disappearance at the sheriff's office, a riot ensured. Returning to Michigan, Taylor became assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan in 1966.

The riots wounded the Motor City in 1967, and it might have been mortal. Judge Taylor was there for the aftermath, first the nearly fifty dead and over a thousand wounded, and then the White Flight from the city, and the hemorrhaging of the tax base.

She divorced the Congressman in 1971, but stayed active in local politics, allying herself with Mayor-for-Life Coleman Young and the Carter campaign in 1976. President Carter appointed her to the Federal bench in and she was sworn in just before the dawn of the Reagan Era in 1979.

She chief judge of Michigan's Eastern District in 1997, but stepped down at the end of the following year to assume “senior status” and reduce her workload after she reached retirement age of 65. She continued to serve as a senior federal judge, picking the cases to which she would become involved.

The NSA case was one that appealed to her, so to speak, and based on her history, you can understand why. They say that she is firm but fair, and smart as a whip. Civil Rights are what she is about. I think the Administration's contention that “everything is fine” went against her grain.

Yesterday, Judge Taylor ruled that the NSA program violates the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. She said that there
“were no kings in America,” a clarification for which I am grateful.

For its part, NSA views the program as essential to the detection and prevention of terrorist attacks, and has appealed the ruling. It will continue, pending resolution in the 6th Circuit of the Court of Appeals.

I am doing a lot of traveling in the next couple weeks, and if the program continues at least that long, I think justice will be served.

I don't know about the holidays, though.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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