MOONLIGHT GRAHAM

UPDATES: 

SECOND UPDATE: Fed board member Cook wins, President loses. The Supreme Court has ruled (5-4) that the President cannot fire Cook just because she's black, female (two big strikes in this administration) and he didn't appoint her. Justice Alito's one word dissent COWARDS will become legend. * Justice Kavanaugh (just have a beer and chill dude) was the swing vote, joining CJ Roberts, who wrote the opinion, and the three normal justices -Sotomayor, Kagan, and Brown Jackson. Note that the majority agreed that if the administration ordered some hapless AUSA to indict Cook on trumped up (pun intended) mortgage fraud charges, the status of Cook could be re-addressed. 

Apropos of nothing, but wouldn't it be so cool if we had a supreme court justice named Jackson Brown?  Then we could really opine that the Court is running on empty. 

FIRST UPDATE: This will be a busy week for nerdy Supreme Court watchers (like federal bloggers who work on top of a garage for example) as several important decisions remain to be announced before the Court flees hot, muggy DC. Today the Court declined to hear the appeal by the person accused of sexually abusing the writer jean Carrol. The five-million-dollar judgement stands against her convicted abuser (blog policy usually stops us from identifying people involved in sexual assault cases. In this instances, Ms. Carrol has often, repeatedly, and publicly identified her MAGA assailant). Wonder if the White House will cover the spectacle of the check being cut and mailed? 

In other pending cases the Court will decide if the President can fire a member of the Fed for reasons he made up; if the President can order the deportation of people born in the United States to foreign parents just because and that the fourteenth amendment is mostly BS anyway and everyone knows it;    and, finally,  if the President is in fact bound by the law or Constitution in anything he does. In that last case, the oral argument exclamation from Justice Alito still has legs on social media: "He's a republican president for gosh sakes. it's not like he's Obama. He can do what he wants...jeeze, enough already with the lawsuits."  *

Todays Post: 

No one better to explain Moonlight Graham than the author of the Constitutional Calendar. 

As originally drafted, Art. II provided that the presidential candidate who got the most electoral-college votes would become president, and the candidate who got the second-most votes would become vice-president.  That didn’t work.  The Twelfth Amendment changed the system to more or less what we have now: a presidential candidate chooses his vice-presidential candidate, typically based on some perceived electoral advantage that the vice-presidential candidate offers.  

In the 1932 election Franklin Roosevelt felt obliged to choose as his running mate John Nance Garner, a congressman from Texas and Speaker of the House.  To the very limited extent that Garner is remembered today, it is for his comment that the vice-presidency wasn’t “worth a bucket of warm piss.”  (The newspapers that reprinted that remark engaged in a little Comstockery, rendering it as “warm spit.”  Apparently “warm spit” was more appropriate for printing in mass-circulation newspapers.)

In anticipation of the 1936 election, F.D.R. was toying with the idea of switching running mates.  Without telling much of anybody, he telephoned Frank Porter Graham, president of the University of North Carolina, and offered the vice-presidential candidacy to him.  Graham was flabbergasted and of course flattered, but he turned the president down.  He just didn’t think he was qualified for the job.  In the end, Roosevelt endured another term with Garner.

But Frank Porter Graham didn’t stay out of political life forever.  In 1949 the governor of North Carolina appointed him to fill a vacancy in the United States Senate as a consequence of the death of one of North Carolina’s senators.  Graham did so, but wasn’t re-elected; his views on civil rights were considered too liberal for the times.  

An educator, briefly a senator, an early champion of civil rights – undoubtedly Frank Porter Graham contributed something that America could be proud to remember.  But his contribution was as nothing compared to that of his older brother Archibald.

Archie went to medical school, making a few dollars and having some fun along the way by playing baseball.  Whether he was a medical student who moonlighted as a ballplayer or a baseball player who moonlighted as a medical student, he was stuck with the nickname “Moonlight” Graham.  He bounced around the minor leagues for . . . oh, six or eight years or so.

But in June of 1905 he was called up to the New York Giants.  And on Thursday, June 29, he played two innings in right field.  He handled no chances, and the game ended before he came to bat.  One game, no plate appearances, no hits.  A baseball career easily forgotten.

And so it was – until the movie Field of Dreams reproduced Moonlight Graham’s story with surprising accuracy.  (There are some discrepancies, but they don’t spoil the narrative.)  He finished his medical degree and ended up spending his life as a small-town doctor in Chisholm, Minnesota.  He gave of himself to care for his patients, and they loved him.  And he had no regrets.  No, he really didn’t.

Don’t believe me?  Then watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCNp_jl5m6c

Happy Moonlight Graham Day, June 29.

* Some of our reporting on the Supreme Court is parody and satire and we leave it to the careful and discerning reader to figure it our.