Linda Greenhouse: Just Answer the Question, Ms. Kagan
[Linda Greenhouse, the winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The New York Times from 1978 to 2008. She teaches at Yale Law School and is the author of a biography of Justice Harry A. Blackmun, “Becoming Justice Blackmun.”]
AMONG its other virtues, the nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court is an opportunity to rescue the confirmation process from the “vapid and hollow charade” that it has become.
The words in quotation marks are those of Ms. Kagan herself, from an article she wrote for the law review of the University of Chicago when she was an assistant law professor there in 1995. The article was a clarion call for substantive questions from senators and similarly substantive answers from Supreme Court nominees. The court and its justices, Professor Kagan asserted, are simply too important for anything less to be acceptable.
I hope very much that the nominee means now what she wrote then. But that won’t matter if, as I fear, her White House handlers muzzle her on the theory that there is nothing to be gained by departing from the minimalist approach to hearings that has been working....
No one has asked me, but I have a question to which I would love to get Solicitor General Kagan’s answer. Last October, in her second appearance before the Supreme Court, she defended the federal government’s position on the validity of a Congressionally authorized land swap in the Mojave Desert that left a Latin cross standing on land that had once been federal property, but was now privately owned. The question in the case, Salazar v. Buono, was whether this extremely odd real estate deal was a proper response to a decision that a private citizen had won in a lower court, which ruled that it was unconstitutional for the cross to be displayed on federal land.
Ms. Kagan argued that the plaintiff, Frank Buono, no longer had standing to pursue his challenge because he had testified earlier that as a Catholic, he had no general objection to crosses, just to crosses on government property. But the cross was now on private land; ergo, ran the government’s argument, no standing....
Read entire article at NYT
AMONG its other virtues, the nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court is an opportunity to rescue the confirmation process from the “vapid and hollow charade” that it has become.
The words in quotation marks are those of Ms. Kagan herself, from an article she wrote for the law review of the University of Chicago when she was an assistant law professor there in 1995. The article was a clarion call for substantive questions from senators and similarly substantive answers from Supreme Court nominees. The court and its justices, Professor Kagan asserted, are simply too important for anything less to be acceptable.
I hope very much that the nominee means now what she wrote then. But that won’t matter if, as I fear, her White House handlers muzzle her on the theory that there is nothing to be gained by departing from the minimalist approach to hearings that has been working....
No one has asked me, but I have a question to which I would love to get Solicitor General Kagan’s answer. Last October, in her second appearance before the Supreme Court, she defended the federal government’s position on the validity of a Congressionally authorized land swap in the Mojave Desert that left a Latin cross standing on land that had once been federal property, but was now privately owned. The question in the case, Salazar v. Buono, was whether this extremely odd real estate deal was a proper response to a decision that a private citizen had won in a lower court, which ruled that it was unconstitutional for the cross to be displayed on federal land.
Ms. Kagan argued that the plaintiff, Frank Buono, no longer had standing to pursue his challenge because he had testified earlier that as a Catholic, he had no general objection to crosses, just to crosses on government property. But the cross was now on private land; ergo, ran the government’s argument, no standing....