Exterminate This: The Tom DeLays and the lawyers - Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; House of Representatives majority whip Tom DeLay

National Review, March 5, 2001 by John Derbyshire

In January of this year, Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave a talk at the law school of the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her topic was judicial independence, and in particular "assaults on judges from the political branches." To illustrate her point, she singled out the current majority whip of the U.S. House of Representatives:

One powerful member of the U.S. Congress, Tom DeLay, has advocated the impeachment of judges who render unpopular decisions that, in his view, do not follow the law. Mr. DeLay, who is not a lawyer but, I'm told, an exterminator by profession . . .

DeLay has, in fact, been a salaried elected official since 1978. Prior to that, he did indeed run a small exterminating business in Sugar Land, Tex. This fact became known early in his political career, and his opponents, as well as newspaper commentators and cartoonists, have had good sport with it for years. DeLay is surely used to the quips by now, though he may have begun to find them irritating, or perhaps just wearying: In the biography posted on his congressional website, he notes only that he "owned and operated a small business." He certainly took exception to Justice Ginsburg's remarks, though, and issued a spirited rejoinder:

I'm sure Justice Ginsburg does not believe that the judicial branch is above accountability. . . . I also reject Ginsburg's assertion that I am not qualified to offer an opinion on problems within our justice system. . . . I believe that average Americans-not just Ivy League lawyers-have both a right and an obligation to speak out when they see members of the judiciary overstepping the proper scope of the law.

This exchange illustrates two key features of our political life today: first, that we are undergoing a slow drift toward a mandarinized society run by an elite of law-school graduates who hold all occupations other than their own in more or less open contempt; and second, that resistance to this drift is alive and well, even in the lawyer-heavy U.S. Congress.

To run an exterminating business is, of course, to provide a very useful service to one's fellow citizens, much more useful than the ones most civilian government employees provide. I have no idea whether or not Albo Pest Control, the firm DeLay ran, was successful, and I bet Justice Ginsburg doesn't know either, but it is certain that without small firms like that, life would be very difficult indeed. And yet the law-school elites and their hangers-on regard those who provide these services with disdain-a disdain so internalized they assume that everyone else feels it too, so that they can be free to opine as Ginsburg did (even on foreign soil). Remember the comment of that other law-school graduate (and wife of a law-school graduate), Hillary Clinton, during the debate on her health-care plan, dismissing questions about the burdens it would place on small firms with the sneering remark that she could not "be responsible for every undercapitalized small business in America."

Remarks like these are now ubiquitous. I took a break from writing this article to watch a Fox News discussion about the Marc Rich pardon. There was Democratic strategist Bob Beckel-architect of Walter Mondale's 1984 presidential campaign-laying into Congressman Dan Burton, whom he referred to as a graduate of the "Iowa Institute of Auto Mechanics." It seems to me that on any rational scale of values, an auto mechanic ranks much higher in social utility than a political consultant. Why anyone should think less of a man for having acquired such an honorable trade is not clear, but plainly Beckel believes we should so think. (In fact, Burton's congressional bio lists Indiana University and the Cincinnati Bible Seminary. Beckel holds a B.S. from Wagner College, a liberal-arts institution in New York City.)

In Imperial China the social ranking was shi, nong, gong, shang: the scholar-bureaucrat, the farmer, the artisan, and last of all the despised merchant. Some such spirit has always been present here-see the description of Gopher Prairie's commercial center in chapter 4 of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street. The partiality of America's ruling classes toward lawyering has a long pedigree, too: Lawyers were prominent in the Continental Congress, and seven of the first ten presidents were lawyers. The 27th president, William Howard Taft, was actually made chief justice of the United States after leaving the White House, and found the second line of work much more agreeable than the first. He wrote: "I don't remember that I ever was President."

It is a curious feature of political vituperation in this country that a president who has been a lawyer is never made fun of on that account, while a president who has followed any other trade is never allowed to forget it. Reagan was scoffed at for having been an actor, Truman for his adventures in haberdashery, Carter for his career as a peanut farmer. Yet neither Coolidge, the most mocked of all modern presidents, nor Nixon, the most reviled, ever had it held against him that he had once been a working lawyer.