Posted by
Bill Crawford on Monday, May 17, 2010 9:55:06 PM
Elena Kagan is a Harvard lawyer. It seems to be an airborne disease in those hallways. Next October, she will be a Supreme Court Justice. Like Obama is fond of saying, elections mean things.
She is not replacing a conservative or even a swing vote, so the Judiciary Committee in the Senate, already dog tired and with bigger fish to fry, will sleepwalk her hearings through and into a vote, save for some histrionics from Jeff Sessions and friends.
I learned the importance of this from watching Scalia sail through unscathed, and then watching the natives march through the town square with open torches for Bork and Thomas (who was replacing Thurgood Marshall).
The larger point being, the makeup of the court is something even the sitting Justices watch, which is why they no longer retire unless they like the President who will be naming their replacement.
So, yes, she is a Harvard nut job. Her tussles with keeping military recruiters off campus is small time politics. I speak of her words on the First Amendment being judged by it's effects, which is so potentially problematic that I wouldn't have even supported her as Solicitor General. The court she will enter will quite likely not allow her to be a power of any kind. I hate to have to depend on that, but there are still voices of sanity in the legal world, even if the old joke still holds relevance about how lawyers never get prescribed Viagra because it only makes them taller.
This sanity is what has prevented the black robed circus animals on the Ninth Appellate Circuit (California, natch) from making the Supreme short lists. In every world, there are thinkers that try to prevail. The legal world is still dominated by a meritocracy, even if the ambulance chasers who beat shoes on the table (like Obama) seem to grow like crabgrass, especially in the Ivy League hangouts.