CLAP HANDS!

The king is dead. Long live the king. Mr. Sutherland was a fine judge, a fine judge. Now he can retire to a farm somewhere to reappear at intervals in the rotogravure. For we're going to have a new judge, goody-goody, and I wonder who it will be.

Whee! Perhaps it's going to be Landis. Everybody stand round, and start looking for a new Law School Dean. Heaven forfend. Get Sutherland back on the bench quick. Perhaps it's going to be Frankfurter, and everybody knows he just runs the New Deal. Well, it might be Gus and it might be Bill and it might be Charlic. The American public can bet its boots that the presses will be full of conjecture about this public man and that. Then the choice comes. Somebody says he's good, somebody says he's bad. If it's a man from the South, somebody will make the amazing discovery that he joined the Democratic party because he wanted to make a success of politics.

The next judge might almost be anybody, right down to the man in the street, though of course there are lots of people who it won't be. But it doesn't really make much difference who it is. Supreme Court appointees aren't supposed to know anything; all they have to do is agree with the man who appoints them.