On the day I showed up at the Supreme High Court of the Land--actually I had to bang on the door at Brooks Brothers and make em open up early because I forgot my tie, which is a capital offense at the Supreme Court--I first had to wade through about a hundred of those Ten Commandments Berserkers who seem to be everywhere these days, the ones who cart around effigies of Moses' tablets and scream Bible verses into the ether. They were assembled in highest dudgeon on the steps of the court, hurling rebukes at the stately Greek columns, ripping up court decisions, and making occasional reference to a giant coffin with "ROE VS. WADE, 1973" printed on it.

I was about halfway through the clench-jawed multitude, cowering against the loudspeaker epithets, when I thought, "Hey, wait a minute, WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?"

I went over and checked the giant poster-board tablets they'd conveniently provided for those of us who need Biblical crib sheets, and my eyes went instantly to Commandment Numero Three-o:

THOU SHALT NOT MAKE UNTO THEE ANY GRAVEN IMAGE

Uh, would that be sorta like a two-and-a-half-ton slab of granite in the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court Building? After all, the original tablets were lightweight enough for Moses to carry the suckers down off the mountain. These are so gargantuan that, if you do the calculus on em, they have to be at least 10,400 percent larger than the originals--and THAT'S assuming that Moses was a beefy buccaneer type with a strong back. If you put it in Ozark Mountains terms, it's the equivalent of a 624-foot neon Jesus, which I realize might be desirable among the present company but would be DAMNED GRAVEN.

So anyway, this guy is screaming "We hold this court in CONTEMPT! We hold this court in contempt of the court of Almighty God! We pronounce this court DEAD to the law of God! We hold this court no longer relevant or binding upon us or UPON OUR CHILDREN! This court is BLIND to the law of God!"

And all the time he's talking, there are three guys blowing these curved goat-horn kind of trumpets that he calls shofars ("Let the shofars sound!") but the sound they make is like those long plastic horns that people blow at football games, which is obnoxious EVEN AT FOOTBALL GAMES.

It turns out they're mad about a LOT of stuff. One woman carries a big sign that says SHAME ON THE COURT FOR LAWRENCE VS. TEXAS. (That would be the case where the two luckless gay guys were rousted out of their apartment for copulating in painful ways that were subsequently ruled lawful.) Another big purple banner says "The Lord Is Our Judge/The Lord Is Our Lawgiver." And one of the first things the top-dog preacher does after saying "We proclaim this ecclesiastical court begun!" is to have about 20 children gather around him so he can give them the court's Roe v. Wade decision and have them rip it to shreds. (The kids do it gleefully. It's more fun than listening to the speeches.) When the preacher turns back to the Greek columns to rebuke the court again, I say to no one in particular, "Uh, there's nobody inside from that court."

And the Berserker to my left glances toward me skeptically, and I say, "Well, I take that back. Rehnquist was on that court, but he voted AGAINST Roe v. Wade. So the only guy in the building who can be rebuked . . . shouldn't be rebuked."

I quickly perceive that my attempt at theological debate has been ruled out of order, and feeling a little too hemmed in by fierce Calvinist rectitude, I skedaddle upward past the cordon of about 30 nervous federal cops who have formed a human wall between the Berserkers and the morning tourists.

But can I say this for the Roy Moore Fan Club Brigade? The general outline of their premise is correct. Because the Supreme Court IS a temple. It looks like a temple, functions like a temple. It even has a Holy of Holies called the "Conference Room." The Conference Room is so sacred that only the nine High Sheriffs can go inside. They can't even bring a staff member to take notes. There are no transcripts of the deliberations, and it may be the one place in the government where even Matt Drudge can never reach.

In fact, the architecture of the court is not only classically pagan, in the manner of Mediterranean peoples who foretold the future in the entrails of bulls, but parts of it are downright bizarre. Look at the west pediment. See what appears to be a half-naked Greek god reclining like a libertine, as if he's about to be fed a grape? That's no Greek god. It's William Howard Taft, showing more marbled flesh than any ex-President or ex- Supreme Court Justice (he was both) should ever reveal outside a Russian bath house. Lawrence v. Texas indeed.

Okay, so there are two ways for the Great Unwashed to get into the Supreme Court building. (Actually three ways. You can smoke some peyote for religious purposes and go in with your ACLU lawyer, but I'm not counting people with ACTUAL BUSINESS, okay?) The two ways are: you can stand in the Three Minute Line, or you can stand in the Whole Ball of Wax Line. The three-minute line is for people with short attention spans. They wanna see the Supreme Court, but they don't wanna see THAT MUCH of it. They're taken inside in small groups and allowed to watch for exactly three minutes before being ushered out again. This is what channel surfing has done to the national psyche. The other line is for people who agree to sit in a flimsy saloon chair for one entire two-hour session of oral argument, not fidgeting and not making any noise, while the lawyers fling their torts.

While waiting in line, you're actually positioned between two enormous lampposts adorned with the likeness of Themis, the goddess of justice, and her daughters, the Three Fates, who are busily "weaving the Thread of Life." Excuse me, but isn't this kind of the WRONG MESSAGE to be sending somebody who shows up trying to right a wrong? "Well, guess it's your FATE, buddy! It's already woven by these three bitches." Blow the shofar on whoever came up with that one.

Actually, disoriented members of the media--I qualify--are not required to stand in either line, but are directed to a side entrance, out by the Dempster Dumpsters, where you pass through a metal detector and are given your special pink card entitling you to sit in a spindly butt-punishing chair in the press section, but not until you've traversed a half mile of marble hallways and staircases that summon up depraved Roman senate scenes from "Gladiator." I had to traverse the marble labyrinth twice, because, having forgotten my writing implement--someday I'll get the hang of this reporting stuff--I had to make an emergency visit to the Supreme Court Gift Shop, where I suppressed the urge to purchase a copy of "My Grandmother Is a Supreme Court Justice" (with Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the cover) and selected instead an official Supreme Court writing pen in the shape of a wooden gavel, with "U.S. Supreme Court" engraved magisterially on the handle.

Later, seated among my colleagues of the Fourth Estate, I would reflect that being the only media representative using an official Supreme Court gavel pen was probably not the best way to engender collegial respect. But then I had a knack for breaking ALL the rules of the court.

First I tried to sit in the wrong section. The press sits sideways in the court, in chairs that are positioned to the left as you're facing the bench, half hidden among enormous marble pillars. (The press literally PEERS OUT FROM THE SHADOWS. Why do I find this so appropriate?) I walked between the two rearmost pillars, thinking I would need to get a good angle on the bench or else I would need frequent shiatsu neck massage later, but a stern guardian of order--they're everywhere, hands clasped behind their backs, waiting for you to SCREW UP--snapped at me to sit ONLY in the first two sections, which would be the chairs between Columns One through Three.

Sheepishly, I shuffled up to the front and started pushing forward through the wooden chairs, like a second grader in the remedial reading group, when I was admonished again. "Not in the first two rows." I turned to the stern visage. He explained that THOSE rows were for REAL reporters--USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post--and that I was entitled only to the section in which wooden chairs were spaced about two inches apart, with six inches for knee room, and that the next two hours were gonna be spent in a position normally assumed by blindfolded kidnap victims waiting to be shot. I took the first "legal" row-- only to be admonished a third time. "Chairs by the easel are for courtroom artists." Whatever look I gave the guy must have inspired a temporary moment of pity, because he added, "Maybe we won't have artists today."

In fact, we didn't have artists on this day. I knew this when newspaper reporters representing East Pisgah, Kentucky, and Bozeman, Montana, swept into the easel chairs two minutes before kickoff, relegating me to a knot of coiled flesh squeezed up against a marble column.

The first thing you notice about the Supreme Court chamber is that it's acoustically amazing. You can drop an official Supreme Court writing pen in the shape of a gavel, and the resulting clatter of cheap wood on marble can be heard in every corner of the room. The second thing you notice is that almost ALL the seats in the audience are for lawyers. You know how in most courts there's a wooden bar with a swinging gate on it, and the lawyers sit in front of the gate? At the Supreme Court, that gate is so far back from the bench that about 75 percent of the chairs are for lawyers who have NOTHING TO DO WITH THE CASES BEING ARGUED. These are people who just show up like hardcore boxing fans who can't resist a live card, even if it's a couple of flyweight non-contenders in a mismatch.

After the gallery is repeatedly enjoined to maintain absolute silence--"I can't emphasize enough that you must remain silent!" says a crewcutted officer with a military bearing--we're alerted to the presence of The Nine by a loud buzzer. Enough people know the drill that the entire crowd LEAPS to its feet as one, and five seconds later the opera curtains part and the robed justices emerge in clumps of three to take their seats in high- backed chairs--and when I say high-backed, I mean these things are like "Alice in Wonderland" chairs that would make Shaquille O'Neal look like a midget--and as they get settled in, a woman to the right of the bench does the "Oyez oyez oyez" thing, which I've never understood but is apparently essential to declaring the court in session. (She doesn't really seem to have her heart in her Oyezes, to tell you the truth.)

And then Boss Rehnquist takes over. You know he's the boss because he has four metallic gold stripes on the arms of his robe. I thought this was some official tradition of the court, but I later found out Chief Justice Bill had the stripes sewn on there because he saw the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta "Iolanthe" and he liked the costume of the Lord Chancellor. I'm wondering how far you could take this. What if you wanted, say, a couple of happy faces on your robe, or just a really cool antique rose pattern? (Sandra Day O'Connor looks to me like a woman who could manage a mean cross-stitch.)

Anyway, to say this man Rehnquist is efficient is like saying Sammy Sosa has a pretty good swing. He swears in all the out-of-town lawyers in, like, three minutes, then gives them a standard "warm welcome" that doesn't sound that warm. And five seconds after that the court has plunged into the arcane world of interpreting the law. Two minutes after that, everybody EXCEPT the nine justices is thoroughly confused.

Let history record that the first case of the 2003-2004 Supreme Court season was the rousing Frew et al. v. Hawkins et al., and just so you'll be envious of the intellectual high times we had with it, I'll quote from the bill of particulars:

"This case spotlights the relationship between consent decrees and the Eleventh Amendment. It asks whether state officials waive their sovereign immunity by entering into a consent decree that is enforceable in federal court, and if no waiver occurs, whether a federal court can enforce the decree only to the extent that it enforces clear, pre-existing federal rights."

I don't know about you, but when I read that, I was ready to get naked and blow on a shofar while dancing in William Howard Taft's toga. I'm surprised there weren't ticket scalpers outside, hawking three-minute seats like scofflaws at a Madonna concert. I couldn't wait to find out which state officials might be waiving their sovereign immunity and consenting and decreeing and arguing over their pre-existing federal rights. In other words, I had NO EARTHLY IDEA what they were talking about.

All I know is that a Texas lawyer named Susan Finkelstein Zinn moved up to the lectern, launched into an explanation of why Frew was right and Hawkins was wrong, and she hadn't even gotten much beyond "May it please the court . . ." when suddenly the beetle-browed Antonin Scalia POUNCED on her. You still couldn't figure out what they were talking about--it was all about waivers, and decrees, and "alleged ongoing violations"--but Nino Scalia, known affectionately among his clerks as "The Ninopath," was already tired of hearing her talk about it and wanted to beat her up a little bit.

This seems to be the operative procedure. The lawyers show up with a big notebook full of speaking points, and the justices make it their business to make sure they never get to the second one. Think about it. You've spent your entire legal career speaking to one judge at a time or, if you do a lot of appellate work, maybe three. Suddenly you're looking up--and you do look WAY up--and you've got the whole starting lineup of the Chicago Cubs whizzing fastballs at you, ALL AT THE SAME TIME. Scalia had barely finished his first two zingers before David Souter chimed in, and since Susan Zinn is a young polite woman--designer glasses, sensible suit, kind of a mousy voice--she tended to answer with "Our position has been . . ." and "We have argued that . . ." and "We don't think it's necessary to prove . . ." and "Even if that is true, our secondary argument is . . ." without realizing, I guess, that the judges HATE that. What they want is yes, no, and simple declarative sentences that indicate you've taken a position that rules out having a backup position. Backup positions are considered a little dishonest and using "our position is . . ." all the time is looked on as continually referring to your notes instead of doing some fancy dancing with your mind.

Now. If you'd been watching the court for a while, and you wanted to make sure you were physically ready for the ordeal, you would probably tilt your body slightly to the left, because that's where most of the heavy body blows are gonna come from. Ginsburg, Souter and Scalia all sit in a little coven on the far left--and they're all MAJOR talkers. What's confusing about it is that Ginsburg is the official court liberal and Scalia is the official court conservative, and the two of em are best buddies-- they go to operas together and stuff--and so they can feed off each other in a thoroughly disorienting way. You've got a Sicilian Catholic Latin scholar and a feminist Brooklyn Jewish mother smiling at each other's jokes, following up each other's questions, and pretty much whipsawing you in a game of ideological ping-pong, with Souter sitting between em like a junior high science teacher, smirking like the cheshire cat when he's not politely begging to differ from something you just said. (Souter lives alone in a New Hampshire farmhouse, so he has LOTS of time to think about this stuff.)

Then you've got the three guys on the opposite end of the bench--Kennedy, Thomas and Breyer--who tend to just humiliate you with body language. First of all, they're all ROCKERS. They give those chairs a real workout--Clarence Thomas can lean back so far in his that you think he might just pitch backward and knock out a couple of pilasters--and when they're not doing that they're holding their heads in their hands, or running their hands over their faces the way a high school gym coach does when you break a window with the kickball. Thomas stares at the lawyer like a contented Buddha, never speaking a single word, in a way that I find extremely disconcerting, especially when he follows it up with a full facial sweep, almost CLAWING his hand down across his cheeks and jaw. I asked my colleagues whether he was especially bored when I saw him, but they all assured me that, nope, he never talks. He's opposed to many things, and apparently one of them is questioning the attorney. He talks more to Breyer, in fact, than to the counsel. The two of them are occasionally engaged in spirited asides--about what? the World Series?--in the middle of oral argument.

In the middle of the bench, by the way, you have the three justices with the most seniority--Rehnquist is dead center, with John Paul Stevens on his right and Sandra Day O'Connor on his left. This trio is so old that even the presidents who appointed them seem distant memories. Rehnquist was named to the court by Nixon, who called him "Renchberg" and "Renchquist" because he could never pronounce his Swedish name (which means "mountain goat," by the way). Stevens was the one and only Gerald Ford appointee. And O'Connor was named to the court right after Reagan took office for his first term, back when she was known for being the top lady lawyer in Arizona and a friend of both Chief Justice Warren Burger and state Republican icon Barry Goldwater. (The only faction that opposed her was the Christian right, with Jerry Falwell calling on "good Christians" to protest against her because of some pro-abortion votes in the Arizona senate. Goldwater's response: "Every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.")

Here's the secret to dealing with the center: ignore them. They've been around long enough that that they don't feel the need to ask that many questions, and when they do they tend to be like kind-hearted grandparents who are probably going to give you a break. Stevens, in fact, with his bow tie and his wispy white hair and his soft mellifluous voice, is a kind of Santa Claus figure who talks like one of those late-night announcers on the classical radio station. You want him to keep on talking because he's just so damned PLEASANT about everything, as though he's telling you a bedtime story.

Rehnquist and O'Connor are both relatively quiet. One fairly frightening possible explanation for this is that, when they were both law students at Stanford, they were boyfriend and girlfriend. (O'Connor even took him home to the Lazy B Ranch to meet the folks.) It's one thing to have an ex who still works in the same office, but when you're number one and number two in seniority, destined to sit side by side for the rest of your LIFE, I would think you could get a little TESTY about it. Who knows, maybe they're thinking, "Oh yeah, RIGHT, NOW you say you don't believe in interstate trucking regulations imposed from Washington, but THAT'S NOT WHAT I REMEMBER FROM 1951, the night you kissed me in the middle of the Quadrangle!" I mean, ALL old dating memories can be CRAZY, right?

One baffling thing about cases argued before the Supreme Court is that nobody ever refers to any specific PEOPLE or PLACES. Unless you have a program, you could listen to this whole case and never know that it took place in the state of Texas, or that it involved a couple of mothers who sued the state over failure to carry out some Medicaid laws. In fact, if you get down into the nitty gritty of the details of the case, it's all about . . . sick babies! In 1993 these two mothers sued on behalf of their children, claiming that Texas didn't tell them they were entitled to something called Early Periodic Screening, Diagnosis and Treatment, which is a Medicaid program that the federal government pays for but which the state government has to spend money to provide. Basically they were saying that, because of all these state officials who didn't give a flip, there were mothers who didn't know the services were available, or they weren't given the services when they did know they were available, or EVEN AFTER THEY SHOWED UP WITH A SICK BABY, they got no treatment.

If they had called it the "Texas Is Mean to Sick Babies Case," I would have understood it right away. But it had already been in court for ten years, and now the only thing the court was trying to decide was whether the state officials could be sued for not doing their jobs. It's actually the result of a class action involving 1.5 million children, with a consent decree from the nineties in which the state of Texas said, "Okay, in the future we'll take care of these sick babies." But Linda Frew and Jeneva Frazar, the two mommies the case is named after, claim that Texas didn't take care of the babies even AFTER the consent decree, so they want to sue the pants off the officials. The state of Texas claims that the officials are immune from prosecution, because they never admitted to violating any federal laws. So a lot of the Supremes' questions to the lawyer for the state of Texas--a guy named Rafael Edward Cruz--involved variations on the theme of, "Well, they must have done SOMETHING wrong if they signed a consent decree. Are you telling the court they can't be punished if they didn't follow through on it?"

Edward Cruz is a young guy with a straight nose, short hair, and a high piercing voice--don't any of these lawyers ever think about going to voice class?--but he's an absolute warrior. I thought they beat up Susan Zinn, but the assault on Cruz was brutal. He got off to a bad start when the first thing he did was restate the facts of the case. Since everyone had already been talking about the case for thirty minutes, Stevens was bored by that and went straight for his jugular. Cruz kept trying to make a distinction between a "remedy" and an "ongoing violation," but Stevens insisted that signing a consent decree means there WAS a violation, and every time he gave Cruz a hypothetical or a direct question, he testily dismissed Cruz's answer with "I understand that, BUT . . ." or "Of COURSE not, BUT . . ." Scalia jumped in with, "So you say to the other side, okay, let's not fight, let's sign a consent decree--but you don't give up anything? Why would the other side agree to that?" Then Ginsburg zaps him: "The court had the power to enter the decree but not to enforce it?" Then Kennedy weighs in: "You say it would be more difficult to enforce the decree with litigation. Why would it be more difficult? What you're proposing is more difficult." Cruz starts to answer by citing a case: "Well, under Milliken . . ." "NO!" shoots back Kennedy. "I wanna know under YOU. You're getting into a generalized answer, and I want a SPECIFIC answer."

By this time Cruz is like a piece of raw steak in a lion's cage, and Kennedy is getting some major laughs at his expense. (I noticed that the official "absolute silence" rule is waived if you're laughing at a justice's witticism.) Breyer keeps saying, "What is the purpose of doing this? What is the purpose of the whole consent-decree exercise?" And Cruz has no ready answer except to keep repeating that there was no finding of any violation of federal law . . . but he's clearly sinking as all these little heads that seem so placid suddenly pop up out of the mahogany and lean forward. Ginsburg is especially wily in this respect. She's so small and prim that she tends to disappear, like a little old lady who has to sit on a phone book when she drives so she can see over the dashboard, so that all you notice is a little hair bun and some big earrings, and the only reason you notice THAT is that most of the rest of the bench consists of shiny bald heads. Then she leans way forward and interrupts mid- sentence with "EXCUSE me . . ." and you know there's going to be blood on the floor. She questions in a gentle voice, but the questions are so pointed that they can't be evaded.

Finally Scalia takes pity on the guy--or is it just another way to zing him? He tells Cruz what his argument SHOULD be, even though Cruz hasn't stated it anywhere in his briefs OR his oral argument. "Sometimes you have all these state officers who want to do these wonderful things and they can't do them, so they say 'Throw me into the briar patch' by signing a consent decree."

This is Scalia basically using Cruz as a ventriloquist's dummy to talk to the other justices in the room. He wants the point made, and since Cruz isn't making it, he's trying to get it into the thinking of the court. Cruz stands there, taking a breather while Scalia does his arguing for him, and then--WHAP!-- the worst possible combination: Stevens and Kennedy and Ginsburg all dogpile him at the same time. When he's huffing and puffing and looking like Mike Tyson after five rounds with Lennox Lewis, Sandra Day O'Connor speaks for the first time: "Why sign a consent decree?"

It's almost like they got together in a back room and said, "Okay, the five of you soften him up, and then Sandra will push him over with a feather."

Time's up. Lawyers retired.

When one of these arguments comes to an end, there's always a little shock in the room, because, ten seconds earlier, the air was filled with full-bore dispute, and then there's a little quiet rap of the gavel and everything goes dead. Rehnquist either calls another case or the justices just rise up and exit. This is the moment when, if you look at the faces of the competing lawyers, they almost always seem deflated. They're thinking "What did I say? What did they say? What happened here?" It's like the first five minutes after you're in a car crash. You can't really believe that ambulance siren is for YOU.

After the justices disappear, I linger a moment, trying to beat the circulation back into my legs, but my nemesis the Supreme Court Chair Officer pokes his head around a column and says, "You have to leave now." Yes, I knew that. I wasn't planning on picnicking here.

The Supreme Court hasn't changed for almost a decade now. Stephen Breyer has been sitting in the "newbie" chair, on the extreme right, ever since Clinton appointed him in 1994. The popular conception is that it's a conservative court, but the evidence doesn't really bear that out. The only straight-down- the-line rock-ribbed right-wingers are Scalia, Rehnquist and Thomas. Thomas is especially doctrinaire. If you go to the official Supreme Court Theater and watch the 24-minute up-close- and-personal interviews with a few of the justices, it's Thomas who says he always knows his position before he enters the Conference Room and rarely, if ever, changes it. He's especially zealous about being opposed to any kind of affirmative action, even though he was an affirmative action student at Yale Law School himself. Scalia has been trying to overturn Roe v. Wade ever since he joined the court in 1986 and says frankly that he doesn't believe in the "living Constitution" so much as "the dead Constitution"--the meaning of the original words, as understood in the 18th century. He is freqently the ONLY dissenter, such as the case where the court struck down VMI's exclusion of women. And Rehnquist, long before he was appointed chief justice in 1986, was already known for his lone conservative dissents against the Burger court he was part of, arguing for the death penalty even while the court was striking it down, favoring limitatons on habeas corpus, and voting against the majority in the ORIGINAL Ten Commandments case, Stone v. Graham in 1981, in which the court banned a law that required the posting of the commandments in Kentucky public schools. Rehnquist is a throwback, that rarest of all species, a true states-righter who thinks the federal government should generally stay out of everyone's business, but especially the business of state and local governments. (Rehnquist can surprise you, though. He's the guy who wrote the opinion supporting my idol Larry Flynt against Jerry Falwell, and I DON'T think it's necessarily because he's a fan of the Hustler "Beaver Hunt" section.)

At the other end of the spectrum you've got the troika of Ginsburg, Souter and Breyer. Ginsburg is a flat-out liberal, especially on feminist and affirmative action issues. (She cut her teeth arguing feminist cases before the Supreme Court in the seventies, winning five out of six.) Souter, called "the stealth nominee" when he was named to the court because he'd only written one law review article in his entire life, votes liberal except on cases of criminals asserting rights against the government. And Breyer is a Jewish San Francisco Democrat who still teaches classes at Harvard Law; if you're looking for a liberal resume, he's pretty much got ALL the bullet points.

That means most of the really TOUCHY cases turn on the votes of the wishy-washy, the unpredictable and the downright goofy opinions of Stevens, Kennedy and O'Connor. John Paul Stevens is just all over the lot, one of those eccentric jurists who can seesaw back and forth on any issue depending on his close reading of the facts. He holds the Guinness World Record for number of dissents--well over 600 and rising--and he can get nasty sometimes. (He called the federal government's 10 percent set- aside quota for minority businesses similar to Nazi laws defining who is a Jew, yet he later voted for gerrymandering voting districts so that minorities would be preferred.) Even though he's considered a liberal--the seat he took was that of William O. Douglas, the most famous court liberal in history--he's never a sure thing. He supported the FCC's rules against obscenity on the radio, but voted to strike down the Communications Decency Act of 1997 because he said the Internet was different from radio and should be unregulated. Twice he voted to uphold laws against burning the flag--and yet he was with the majority when they struck down Alabama's "period of silence" in public schools for silent prayer. In other words, you just can't tell what Grandpa is gonna do.

Sandra Day O'Connor, with her big seashell earrings and the air of Martha Stewart about her, doesn't exactly qualify as a feminist, even though she was a big supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment in Arizona and DID vote for liberalized abortion laws. (She later told the Judiciary Committee that vote was "a mistake.") The ex-president of the Phoenix Junior League is a quirkster, frequently finding that she doesn't need to decide anything about a case because the plaintiff doesn't have "standing." (Standing is evidence of direct harm.) She's a death penalty supporter and an opponent of busing on the one hand, but she agreed with the majority when the court approved the most liberal "sexual harassment" definition in history. She was the swing vote when Scalia got his hopes up in 1989 for overturning Roe v. Wade--and Scalia is STILL mad about it. She was pretty much voting with the conservatives on everything, but when Webster v. Reproductive Health Services came up, she only went halfway. She voted to uphold Missouri's restrictions on access to abortion services, but wasn't willing to say abortions should be abandoned entirely. She didn't like the "trimester" system of the Roe v. Wade case, so she came up with what is now known as the "undue burden" standard. Scalia lambasted her by name in his own opinion--something you're really NOT supposed to do--calling her "irresponsible," "irrational" and "not to be taken seriously." (He stopped short of saying, "Women! Harrumph!") She also tends to scattershoot on First Amendment stuff, voting to support the Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Christmas nativity scene on the courthouse square, but voting AGAINST the Alabama one-minute period of silence. She's one of those "Well, that makes sense to me" women, without any kind of ideological bearings.

Then we've got Anthony Kennedy, The Professor, who ended up on the court after the messy Robert Bork hearings in 1987. He's a California Catholic (one of three Catholics, along with Scalia and Thomas) and part of the Stanford mafia (five of the nine justices attended Stanford), and he's thought of as a conservative, mainly because of votes like supporting the Navy's right to exclude homosexuals and Washington state's right to pay women less than men. He's a supporter of drug testing, an opponent of affirmative action, yet he can seesaw toward the left as well. He was another swing vote that defeated Scalia's effort to overturn Roe v. Wade, he supported the flag burners, and he wrote the 1996 opinion striking down the Colorado amendment that banned local laws protecting homosexuals and bisexuals. If anything, he's sort of the swing-within-the-swing, going along with the majority 93 percent of the time, even when he would be expected to go the other way.

What we've got, in other words, is not so much a liberal or a conservative court as a court that pours over the nitty-gritty details of every case and tries to rule as narrowly as possible. Because they deliberate and agonize so much, they're not very prolific. It's rare that they hear even a hundred cases in a year, out of the 7,000 that are submitted for consideration. (The others are dismissed as not worthy of comment--technical term "certiorari denied.") And most of the cases they do hear are not the kinds that make headlines. The press gallery will be packed on the day they hear the Pledge of Allegiance case this winter, but the real day-to-day work of the court is more along the lines of Frew v. Hawkins, which doesn't really break down on liberal- conservative lines, since it's just a matter of deciding which laws apply and how to apply them. They're fascinated, apparently, by what most of us would call fine print. Yes, this Supreme Court is a bunch of nerds.

When I finally leave the building, the Berserkers are still praying and rebuking. The prayer is something about "this ugly, filthy, abominable plague," but I don't stick around to find out which particular plague is being invoked. I'm wondering just how aware the justices are of these mean-streets Cuckooland people who seem drawn to the court as to no other government building. You have fringe banshees in Times Square, too, but there's something about the Supreme Court plaza that seems to spawn schizophrenic rage.

In fact, as I turn to look back at the building, a wild-eyed black woman approaches me and says, "Read and think! For the sake of your blond children!"--and gets a little too close to my face while pressing a bad Kinko's job into my hand. Before I can say, "But I'm not blond," she vanishes. I glance down at her text:

"Dear Descent People,

Stop denying it, we are in the biggest civil war in human history. It is the war between well organized gays, lesbians, bisexuals and multisexuals (sexwith dogs and other animals) legalized rapist of same gender people, black people, vulnerable white other minorities dogs and other animals. Please have the courage to pray for black women. In our days in the United States of America white women lesbians, bisexuals and multisexuals are better organized then were Hitler and his Nazi army (Gestapo), Sadam's and Bin Laden Al Kada's (Taliban) terrorists to sexually harass, assault and to leisurely and legally rape innocent black women. they are lynching innocent black women to force them to have sex with them. They are also Lynching poor white boys and girls and other minorities."

It goes on--and on and on and on.

I wonder if documents like these ever reach their intended targets, somewhere deep inside the Supreme Court Holy of Holies. I wonder if Rehnquist and Scalia and Ginsburg are peering out of one of those big wide windows on the second floor and thinking, "Hmmm, is that the claimant alleging legalized multi-sexual racist dog rape?" Because the popular conception is that justices live in an Ivory Tower and that they're not really aware of the messiness of the streets. In a way it's like ancient Rome, where you had the superstitious rabble on the outside and the reasoned Stoics on the inside. But our Supreme Court has something the ancients never dreamed of: an official gavel pen. I extract my implement and scrawl across the bottom of the page, "Cert. DENIED." The justices may have cooler clothes and chairs, but we're in MY world now.