The Times Tees Off…on Elena Kagan!
Posted on May 11th, 2010 in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
What do we really know about Elena Kagan? asks the New York Times editorial board.
Whether by ambitious design or by habit of mind, Ms. Kagan has spent decades carefully husbanding her thoughts and shielding her philosophy from view. Her lack of a clear record on certain issues makes it hard to know whether Mr. Obama has nominated a full-throated counterweight to the court’s increasingly aggressive conservative wing.
Ambitious design, I imagine—but is it really to ask where Ms. Kagan stands on every hot-button issue of the day? It’s just such a question that leads potential nominees to avoid leaving any hint of paper trail that could later sabotage them. And Kagan, who’s already had one nomination torpedoed, would appreciate this better than most.
I’m not a student of the Supreme Court. (You may have discerned this.) But the idea that we should know exactly where a nominee stands on every issue that might come before the court strikes me as a modern, and not very good, one.
It means only that invariably we have a partisan slugfest every time someone is nominated, and that such a battle is the way things ought to be.
Presidents both Democratic and Republican should care more about a nominee’s qualifications and her open-mindedness.
Otherwise, we are left with an ongoing ideological war rather than a court in whose merits we trust.
5 Responses
5/11/2024 6:52 pm
I think the interesting thing here is the prospect of a ‘wing’ getting a ‘counterweight’ that can be labeled ‘full-throated.’ I guess this is a bird with a pulley for a torso and an extra side trachea.
Is it Serve Up the Spare Bits of Metaphor smorgasbord at the Times today?
I do think Andrew Sullivan’s take has been interesting, albeit unhinged (he goes off his meds for a while every ten weeks or so): we should be suspicious of Kagan, he thinks, because she’s a careerist.
Not being a careerist myself (or at least not a good one), I’m sympathetic to this take: but I actually think most of the time careerism is a separate axis from integrity. If they’re not perpendicular there’s still a significant slant there.
One does wish HLS had been more of an anti-Bush hotbed, though, just like everyplace else shoulda been…
SE
5/12/2023 7:34 am
I should clarify that I believe HLS should have been an anti-Bush hotbed not because the faculty disagreed with his policies, but because his administration’s interpretations of executive power were laughably and unambiguously wrong.
5/12/2023 9:38 pm
Kagan was an excellent Dean, during a time of utter madness at Harvard , reflected well in this article:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299350/
5/13/2010 7:34 am
Politics matter when it comes to picking judges - especially one for the Supreme Court. Maybe it should not, idealistically, but it does. At the heart of the matter is whether you believe the Constitution is a living document - one that should change with, or be molded by, the times, or is is it set in stone - to be interpreted exactly as the framers intended in the late 18th century.
5/14/2010 6:20 pm
HLS may not have been a hotbed of opposition to the GWB administration’s view of executive power, but Kagan did criticize the Bush administration in her 2007 commencement address, and HLS faculty and students did protest the Bush administration’s shredding of the Constitution:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/stoptorture/2006/11/29/hls-students-hold-funeral-for-us-constitution/
I don’t recall that these efforts got very much attention, but then the media had developed a habit of ignoring dissenting voices.
Thank you, “a good dean” for the link to the article by Oxman et al. Great satire (reminds me of Punch), and eerily applicable to the “madness at Harvard” which hasn’t yet ended as far as I can tell.
Al has touched upon the central conflict: attitude toward change. In denying that change makes a difference, strict constructionism is untenable.