I'm still weirded out when columnists just straight up lie. Case in point: Maggie Gallagher's claims in the National Review online that the Human Rights Campaign "specifically cites her support for “marriage equality” in cases before the Supreme Court as a reason for voting for her."
Uhhh... Nope. The press release says no such thing.
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4 comments:
Yeah, that's bogus. The only knock I've seen against her is the way she handled the plagiarism scandals with Tribe and Ogletree, and that article seems overwrought. You know my rule; if it wouldn't get someone already sitting impeached, it's not enough to refuse the President's pick- elections have consequences. And they're not going to find anything else; she's been through it before... vote her in. Heck, at this point, I like her better than Alito or Sotomeyer.
I LIKED Diane Wood better, though she is a logical successor to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and that may be what Obama has in mind. But Kagan seems fine.
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Check David Brooks today. I've stopped reading Brooks much but I think he got Kagan right:
What we have is a person whose career has dovetailed with the incentives presented by the confirmation system, a system that punishes creativity and rewards caginess. Arguments are already being made for and against her nomination, but most of this is speculation because she has been too careful to let her actual positions leak out.
There’s about to be a backlash against the Ivy League lock on the court. I have to confess my first impression of Kagan is a lot like my first impression of many Organization Kids. She seems to be smart, impressive and honest — and in her willingness to suppress so much of her mind for the sake of her career, kind of disturbing.
For all the talk about getting judges with empathy and a sense of the every day person's circumstances, she seems a very strange choice.
It's odd that Gallagher picked SSM to focus on, given that the HRC press release would have supported a contention that they like Kagan for her stance on other LGBT issues: 'Specifically, we applaud Elena Kagan’s vocal opposition to the Solomon Amendment and the discriminatory “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law.'
Brooks's column was the funniest thing I've read in the NYT for weeks. Since when do Republicans think that creativity is a good quality in a Supreme Court justice? If the Constitution's (or statutes') meaning is absolutely obvious and clear from a plain reading of the text, the least useful quality in a judge is creativity.
Also, Brooks's disregard for the quality of Kagan's scholarship just shows how little he knows about legal academia. Eugene Volokh -- by no means a liberal nor an Obama fan -- has a much more sensible assessment that relies on relatively objective metrics (e.g. the frequency with which her articles have been cited).
Kagan is the most Obama-like option out there: wonky but pragmatic.
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