Filibuster Cartoons
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Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination hearings wrapped up last week, concluding in a sadly predictable fashion.
Despite the fact that she was appointed by a liberal president to replace a retiring liberal justice on the Court, the Republican Party has feigned great shock at the fact that Kagan herself is a liberal too. The entire party caucus will likely vote against her appointment on these grounds alone, much as the entire Democratic caucus voted against President Bush’s equally inconsequential replace-one-conservative-judge-with-another appointments he made as president.
All this knee-jerk partisan theater comes off as especially phony when you consider how ahistoric it is. For example, when President Clinton appointed the very liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993 she was approved 96 to 3 in the Senate, with almost every single Republican voting in favor. Likewise, the arch-conservative justice Antonin Scalia was approved unanimously by Democrats when he was picked by President Reagan in 1986. In those days, the Senate had a somewhat more mature understanding of its role in the appointment process, and would not raise much of a fuss if the president’s choice did not change the ideological balance of the Supreme Court in any major way. Today, however, absolutely every issue must be treated as some all-or-nothing battle for partisan supremacy, so we get crazy fights over… maintaining the status quo.
October 5th, 2011 at 10:05 am
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