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On Elena Kagan
So Elena Kagan will be confirmed, and the Supreme Court's ideological balance will remain relatively unchanged, but it will have become markedly sexier. So are the days of our lives.
I find the whole thing depressing, not because she is a liberal and will vote as a liberal -- with markedly little of the moderation, evenhandedness, and objectivity she touted this week -- though that hardly cheers me up. No, I find it depressing because Kagan epitomizes the kind of careerism I loathe. She has almost always talked as if she knew there was a tape recorder in the room and has always maneuvered as if her road map was her permanent record. Her whole career has been an act of self-grooming. Kagan is not a major legal scholar. Rather, she has published just enough stuff to allow her to claim to be a scholar and for her supporters, in and out of the press, to say she's a scholar with a straight face. She's never been a judge, and her litigation record as solicitor general, while impressive, mostly amounted to checking off another box to get her on the court. Nobody really doubts that she's going to be a reliable, partisan liberal vote (like Sotomayor) for the rest of her life on the bench.
I don't blame Kagan too much. There are worse ways for a person to organize her life than doing everything she can to get on the Supreme Court (and I'm hardly one to talk, as I've lived my life with the single-minded goal of winning the World's Strongest Man competition). What I find so distasteful is the way the "system" works so hard to advance people like Kagan. As I noted in my column, in her now-famous book review, she denounced the confirmation process and celebrated Robert Bork at precisely the moment when it cost her nothing to do so and gained her much. But now she repudiates all of that, and the system -- and her conscience -- lets her get away with it. Meanwhile, Shannen Coffin has revealed that she behaved very, very badly when she worked for Bill Clinton, and no one in the mainstream media cares. I don't know whether this anecdote should disqualify her from the Court or not. But I do think it would be a near fatal blow for a Republican nominee to have done the same thing. Anyway, you get all this, I just find it depressing.
