The Poodle Weeps: Spending the Fourth with the Supremes

BILLIE HOLIDAY ON THE SUPREMES:  I celebrated the Fourth this year by trying to make sense of the three six-to-three bombshells the Supreme Court just dropped on us before taking off — hopefully not on some billionaire benefactors’ private jets — for their summer recess. I was reading Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinions. I was reading Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissents. 

I was straining to conjure a unified field theory that would explain these rulings when Billie Holiday — one of America’s all-time great jazz vocalists — showed up from the other side of the grave to give me a swift kick in the ass. 

Holiday — who died of despair, disgust, persecution, and cirrhosis of the liver in 1959 — had synthesized all three opinions down to their bare bones back in 1941. “Them that’s got shall get,” she wrote in “God Bless the Child,” one of the truly all-time great songs in the history of infinity. “Them that’s not shall lose. So the Bible said, and it still is news.”