Many people thought that if Al Gore had won the presidency in 2000, he would have put Judge David S. Tatel on the Supreme Court. The judge had an extraordinary intellect, he was a model judicial craftsman and, incidentally, he had been blind since he was 30 years old.
But George W. Bush prevailed, with the support of a closely divided Supreme Court. President Bush went on to appoint two members of the court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., propelling it toward its current trajectory.
Judge Tatel served for 23 more years on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He relied on people who read him, increasingly sophisticated technology, and an astonishing memory to produce a widely admired body of judicial work that included important opinions on voting rights, the environment, and the Internet.
For years he was reluctant to talk about his blindness. And judicial tact, he said, required him to suppress his growing unease with the Supreme Court’s direction.
In “Vision,” a heartfelt and moving memoir to be published next month, Judge Tatel weaves those two themes together. He talked about them over coffee at the kitchen table of their Washington apartment, with his guide dog, Vixen, watching him intently.
They met in 2019, transforming Judge Tatel’s life. “Vixen freed me physically and gave me enormous independence,” she said. “But she also freed me in the sense that she made me much more comfortable talking about blindness.”
His condition is the product of a retinal disease first diagnosed when Judge Tatel, raised in a Washington suburb, was 15 years old. He became more serious as the years went by and for a long time he tried to hide it.
“I was pretty good at covering it up publicly until 1980, when I started using a cane,” he said. That was a big change and it allowed people to help him.
The judge’s wife, Edie Tatel, highlighted another benefit. “You certainly get a different reaction,” she said, “when you bump into people.”
But he didn’t want his blindness to define him and said it influenced his judicial work only marginally. “Maybe it helped in the sense that, in the oral argument, I didn’t know if a lawyer was well dressed, he was fat or ugly,” he admitted. “I don’t react to those signals.”
He recused himself from a case about whether the Treasury Department should do more to allow visually impaired people to distinguish bills of different denominations. “I had no doubt I could decide the case,” she said, “but I was worried about the appearance.”
He added that he regretted not having disqualified himself from two other cases, related to plastic arts and architectural plans. Others described the evidence to him in great detail, he said, but in retrospect, that was not enough.
“If I had to review those cases,” he wrote, “I would recuse myself.”
His retirement from the court last year freed him in a second sense, he said, freeing him to question the direction of the Supreme Court.
“We have a court that is not subject to the principles of judicial restraint,” he said. “I don’t want to sound scared or anything, but I think that’s a threat to our democratic values.”
Justice Tatel said his retirement was tied to a lesson he learned from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision to remain on the court despite calls for her to resign in time to allow President Barack Obama to name her successor.
“We dined here at this table several times,” he said. In the book, she described “her annoyance with commentators calling for her removal.”
Justice Ginsburg’s contributions to the law will endure, he said. “But there is no denying,” he wrote, “that his death in office ultimately contributed to the downfall of Roe,” and Judge Amy Coney Barrett, brought to the court by President Donald J. Trump and Republicans. Senate, cast the decisive vote to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion.
Judge Tatel, now 82, wrote that he had resigned because he “did not want to risk my seat being filled by a president who had campaigned to elect judges who would fulfill his campaign promises.”
But there was more. “I was also tired,” he wrote, “of having my work reviewed by a Supreme Court that seemed to have so little regard for the principles to which I have dedicated my life.”
In 2012, he wrote the majority opinion for a divided three-judge panel of the appeals court in Shelby County v. Holderrejecting a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The following year, by a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court reversed that decisioneffectively ripping out the heart of the law, which had been a notable achievement of the civil rights movement.
“The court reached the result it did through decidedly non-judicial means,” Judge Tatel said. “It is contrary to the Constitution. It is contrary to its own precedent. And it is completely disrespectful of the conclusions of Congress.”
“The result,” he said, “is a threat to democracy.”
The common thread of many of the Supreme Court’s leading cases, including those involving abortion and affirmative action, Judge Tatel said, “is the expansion of the Supreme Court’s own power, and it is the only branch of the government that is not elected.”
As the interview wound down, Judge Tatel turned his attention back to Vixen, who had an appointment with a veterinarian for an annual eye exam. He reflected on how the dog had changed him.
“When you have a guide dog, everyone wants to talk about it,” he said. “Immediately you’re talking to everyone about the fact that you’re blind.”
That’s fine with Judge Tatel. “If talking too much about my dog is a crime,” he wrote, “I plead guilty. I love talking about Vixen.”
