Hullabaloos Endorsement: Randy Moss for the Supreme Court

From time to time, we here at Holy Hullabaloos: The Blog will officially endorse some worthy individual for a high position in the government, academia, or pornography industry.  Today, I am happy to announce our first endorsement: Randy Moss for the next vacancy at the Supreme Court.  Now, before you freak out and say that it would be irresponsible for President-elect Obama to nominate a famous football player to the highest court in the land, let me put your worries at ease.  Of course I'm not suggesting that the unpredictable wide receiver be put on the bench.  That would be terrible.  I mean, without him drawing double coverage, I don't think the Patriots could even make it to the AFC Championship game, much less win the Super Bowl again this year.

No, the Randy Moss I'm talking about is actually known formally as Randolph D. Moss, a big time partner at Wilmer Hale in DC and a former head of the Office of Legal Counsel ("OLC") at the Department of Justice.  Now, Wilmer figures to send a number of people to the Obama Administration.  David Ogden is heading up the Justice Department transition team, and Seth Waxman, the former Clinton-era Solicitor General, has been talked about as a possible Supreme Court nominee.  But I haven't seen any talk about Randy Moss being part of the administration or being a possible pick for a top judgeship, whether it be on the DC Circuit or the Supreme Court or even a bankruptcy court in Sheboygan.  Admittedly, I spend most of my time puttering about on facebook, so maybe he's all the rage right now and I just haven't noticed.  Just in case, though, here's my plug.

I know Randy because I worked as an attorney-advisor at OLC for two years when he was running the office during the Clinton Administration.  OLC is an office at the Justice Department which provides legal advice--often on matters of constitutional law--to various executive branch actors like the Attorney General and the White House Counsel.  It's the office that wrote the so-called "torture memo" (long after Randy left) and various other quasi-legal justifications for the Bush Administration's massive expansion of executive power.  Justice Scalia used to be the head of the office; Justice Alito was a deputy there.  The late Chief Justice Rehnquist also spent a stint running the place.

The head of OLC has to have good management skills, excellent communication abilities, and a top rate legal mind.  Moss is a fine manager and a good communicator, but his real strength rests in the fact that he's an unbelievably brilliant lawyer.  His abilities, in my view, are awesome, in the literal sense of that word--I often felt in awe listening to him analyze legal problems.  Even if he had never thought about the issue before, often his first take on the matter would be far more insightful and sophisticated than anyone else's, even if that other person (like me) had thought about the thing for days or weeks or pretty much his entire life. 

The joke was that you would bring him a 25 page memo that you had been working on for months, and he would look at it for five minutes and explain why you had looked at the problem entirely the wrong way or had forgotten some critical aspect of the problem.  The joke then expanded (and I'm not sure whether this actually occurred outside my head or not, but I think there were others in on it) to something like: "Did you hear about the deputy in the office who had published a series of four articles on this separation of powers issue in the Yale Law Journal and then wrote a 75 page memo on it with citations to every case ever decided and he showed it to Randy while Randy was sitting on the toilet in the men's room taking a huge dump while working on an alternative proof to Fermat's Last Theorem and Randy took one look at it and said 'well why didn't you consider X' where 'X' referred to some point that totally and irretrievably proved the Deputy's main thesis not just incorrect but down right laughable?" 

The guy is scary smart.  He should be on the bench. 

Comments

[Anon]

I used to work at Wilmer and he was on my floor -- the funniest thing was that the mail guy had a big picture of the NFL Moss on his mail cart for our floor.