Political Theater

The Senate Judiciary Committee today began the tiresome process better known as confirmation hearings, ostensibly to determine whether Obama nominee Elena Kagan possesses the necessary qualifications to succeed the retiring Associate Justice John Paul Stevens. As expected, the Republicans, armed with their talking points, marched lockstep and attacked the nominee for lack of judicial experience, suspected liberal judicial activism, and association with such unsavory folks as Abner Mikva and Thurgood Marshall. Of course, the Democrats, not to be outdone, fell all over themselves, lavishly praising Ms. Kagan for her record of service in the Clinton White House and as dean of Harvard Law School. As usual in these matters, the truth lies somewhere in the middle but it matters little to the partisans because they are busy playing to their respective bases.

A Line of Attack

This is an unpublished letter to the editor responding to a conservative columnist's attack on Obama's Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan for having clerked for the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, who for many on the right is the embodiment of the liberal judicial activist:

Gregory Kane, in an oped ostensibly about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, writes: "I'm not one of those black Americans who has fawning admiration for [Thurgood] Marshall merely because he was the first African American justice. Most black Americans all but genuflect when Marshall's name is mentioned. I practically cringe." For even the most casual reader of the Examiner, Kane's bona fides as a black conservative are well-established, which make his attack on the late Justice Marshall pointlessly gratuitous and irrelevant on the immediate issue, namely, Kagan's fitness to serve on the Supreme Court. Kane's resort to guilt by association - Kagan clerked for Marshall - bespeaks an intellectually laziness and paucity of ideas not normally associated with someone described as "a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist."