European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - June 30, 1986, Darmstadt, Hesse Page id columns the stars and stripes monday. June 30,1986 Anthony Lewis Scalia bringing zest craftsmanship to court president Reagan s Choice of Antonin Scalia for the supreme court has left most liberals in a slate of numbed foreboding. They Sec Scalia As an archetype of the modern Legal conservative ready to Cut had radically on lie definition and enforcement of constitutional rights. My View is less gloomy. Yes Scalia is certainly a conservative there is every reason for concern about he pcs Linn in such Pituc stinks As free speech and peo ple s right of Ami to the courts. Bui there Are other Consul Rauhi. One is simply the isl and inc craftsmanship that a brings i ihc1 Job of judging. Reading Scalia s opinions on the . Court of appeals for me District of co Lumbia circuit line senses a Lough mind grappling with inc hard issues. And it docs not seem to be a closed mind. As far As an outsider can left he is not a judge who wilfully distorts precedent and hides difficulties in order to reach a predetermined result. His Liberal colleagues on inc . Circuit take Hal View of him uni just that he is a Nice person As Many have said but thai he is Good to work with. Judge Patricia m. Wald Laid the Washington Post he does listen he has an open mind he enjoys the dialogue going Back and Forth. I do have the sense that he has Strong feelings about particular things but that he does come to each Case willing to listen to both sides has shown himself ready to perform without flinching what May be the most important and most delicate function of judges in our system. That is to enforce the constitutional allocation of pow ers among the branches of the Federal government. As a Siitam attorney general in the Ford adm Nistra lion Scalia fought the legislative veto terming that device unconstitutional. When president Carter in 1977 uan cd Power to reorganize inc executive Branch and As inc Price of a Bill agreed to let either House of Congress reject any reorganization plan Scalia objected. Gelling legislation through Congress in the Ordinary Way is cumbersome and inefficient he agreed. But the very difficulty of the legislative process was de signed to protect the Public from undue government Power he said and it could not be waived by Mutual the supreme court later found the legislative veto unconstitutional. This year Scalia was on a panel of the court of appeals that held the Gramm Rudman Law in constr George f. Will Tut ional on the ground that its provision for automatic budget cuts infringed on executive Power. He is Gener ally thought to have written he unsigned opinion the Issue is now pending before the supreme court. What we can Sec from the legislative veto and Gramm Rudman issues is that Scalia is ready to enforce the constitutional separation of Powers vigorously when he sees an infringement on presidential Power. The interesting question is whether he will be similarly vigorous when presidents overstep their Power. The great Deci. On on presidential Power was inc steel Case of 19s2. During the korean War president Truman Seid the country s steel Mills to prevent a strike that he said would do grave damage to the War Effort. The supreme court found Hal Congress had refused to provide for seizure in labor cases and thai the president had no Power to act on his own. But in recent years the supreme court has seemed to slip away from the teaching of the steel Case again and again u has winked at novel and far reaching assertions of Power by presidents when they claim National Security reasons. Thus in 1984 the court held that the Reagan administration could bar americans from travelling to Cuba finding that Power in a congressional statute despite legislative history to the contrary. In 1980 the court simply made up Law to penalize a former Cia agent for publishing a Book without submitting it first. Scalia like other conservatives has deplored Judi Cial activism and said the courts should let the political branches govern. But Congress is one of those branches and for a court to give a president Power that Congress has rot granted is activism of an extreme kind. Just the other Day Scalia spoke of the peo ple s prerogative to have their elected representatives determine application of the Law. Will he be ready to protect that prerogative when a president intrudes upon it after All it is executive Power that has grown so fast lately. And the supreme court s classic role As inc economist of London put it. Is to act As a Check on an overweening executive the greatest movie of All time now showing por the ninth time this semes Ter the High school senior from a Chi Cago suburb has faked an illness lick ing his Palms to make them Clammy is his preferred non specific symptom to fool his Dolly parents into letting him dish school. Now speaking directly 1u the camera he says if i go for 10. I m probably going to have to Barf up a ninety minutes later the discerning movie note Well i do not say film " or Cinema goer leaves the idea ice saying at last that is settled. Arguments can rage about whether the second greatest movie is this or that exploration of scandinavian angst or this or that study of men in Black Lur a Lenick pullovers who suffer Urban dread in Paris or Milan with women who drink bitter Coffee and Wear their hair in buns and Ceramic earrings they crafted in their Back Yard kilns. But for those of us who seriously doubt that movies arc often serious it is Clear that the Grea Lesl movie of All time is showing now at Fine Heaters very Wycie it is Ferris Mueller s Day by a realm movie i mean the Movic St movie the one most True to the general spirit of movies the spirit of effortless escapism. Remember Steve Mcqueen in the great escape busting out of a Ger Man pow Camp Ferris borrows a Friend s father s Ferrari and escapes for a Day from something worse High school. As should happen in a teen Ager Libra Dionisi movie Ferris reduces a ferret faced school administrator to rubble bamboozled his soggy headed parents and lives out every teen Ager s fantasy of subverting authority at every turn. Ferris is is the saying goes into fun. The movie will elicit cliches what America s Premier essayist Joseph Epstein Calls ephemeral the cliches will be o the effect that Ferris is a symptom. Need you ask of what of the self absorption of youth corrupted by the complacency of the Reagan years. Such zeitgeist mongering is punctured by Epstein s question when other than periods of War or economic calamity have people not been self absorbed Ferris bueller is Lei us blurt out the worst not serious. But then few movies Are and fewer should be. Here is an oddity of our age. Many people would rather undergo torture or what is much the same thing have a Judith Kranz novel read aloud to them than have it said that they willingly read third rate novels yet those people go to movies Hal Are the moral equivalents of Kranz novels and will read ponderous reviews of those movies. Epstein who believes that much movie reviewing amounts to distinguishing Between the fourth rate and the third Rale says that Reading pair line Kael Page after Page on say the movie Popeye becomes a spectacle Akin to listening to someone play mares eat pats and does eat Oats on a Sara diva of carry me Back to Olden Days when almost All movies were like Ferris Buel Ler no nonsense about seriousness. In the Early 1950s, the 11-year-old intelligentsia in Champaign iii., plunked Down 10 cents for a double feature plus a festival of five cartoons and for an other five cents they could pig out on Juicy fruits. Today s younger generation like every younger generation is dismay ing but has minted a magnificent verb pig alas in the 1950s, movies became films and seriousness settled like soot Over everything. Universities Epstein recalls had film societies and every major City had at least one Little Art House where a pal lid Young woman smoking a russian cig Arette looked up contemptuously from her Baudelaire Long enough to sell you a ticket for a peruvian film that opened on a scene of peasant boys slaughtering a the fruits of such seriousness were and Are enough to make you sympathize with the moviegoer who left a theater exclaiming i Don t Ever Wani 10 see a movie i Haven t already seen be make an exception for the Sage of Fer Ris bueller whose Credo like Hal of every red blooded teen Ager is you can t go Loo but be braced for this fact teen agers go too far with bad Lan Guage. It is perhaps Best to shrug and say As a critic did thai vulgarity is he garlic in the salad of life. Besides be fore you wince and writhe and fear for the Republic because of the coarseness of the children remember the kind of vulgarity you hear on news broadcasts from journalists who ask questions such As Epstein s example what did you think when you first heard your husband had been killed or what went on in your mind when you Learned Hal you had cancer now for the third time or Tell me holy father have you never regretted not hav ing children of your own Ferris and his friends have their faults including a weakness for bad words but at least they do not talk like that
