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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/sable-black-robes/"></div><p style="text-align: center;">I.</p>
<p>One of the most striking features of the modern public ritual initiated when a candidate is named by the President to the Supreme Court is the celerity with which all of the relevant actors snap into place. A general spirit of merriment and free-wheeling parlor speculation mutes one day, quite suddenly, into an aperient tremor across the Beltway papers that that the vetting is now “closed,” that a decision “has been made,” that a nomination is “imminent,” culminating finally in a colorless statement issued by the White House establishing a date and time for the coming-out ceremony: <em>fumata bianca</em>. As the clock strikes the hour of coronation, through Cross Hall and into the East Room will walk the President and the triangulated product of what has for weeks been referred to inevitably by the national press as a “tricky political calculus,” often alongside a beaming wife or husband or mother. And so begins the nominee’s elevation out of obscurity—at least briefly—into the highest reaches of celebrity our political media has to offer. We call this showering of attention the “Supreme Court nomination process,” and it is perhaps, with the exception of our presidential elections, our democracy’s single most elaborate exercise in self-deception. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/sable-black-robes/#more-5209" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
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In Sable and Black Robes

Colson Lin is a 3L at Yale Law School. He is working on a novel, <i class="">The United States of Social Strivers</i>, and an essay collection on the United States in the 2010s.