Dahlia Lithwick: Elena Kagan is "Green Tea" at Her Confirmation Hearings
[Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.]
There is something achingly familiar about Monday afternoon's opening day of Solicitor General Elena Kagan's Supreme Court Senate confirmation hearings. The talking points on both sides—"liberal judicial activist" and "justices who understand real people"—are so overused that at first you think you just might be listening to the mix tape Chief Justice John Roberts prepared for Justice Samuel Alito's hearings. It's not just Kagan who's being interrogated, though: It's Thurgood Marshall, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Sonia Sotomayor. And it's not just that Republican and Democratic senators are applying the same boring old scripts to a brand new nominee. They're actually applying the same boring old scripts to the same boring old nominees.
If the hearing room feels a little bit airless, it's partly because it's full of ghosts....When Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, suggests Kagan had been "steeped in deeply held liberal principles," the contrast between this nominee and the last one is laid right there: Kagan is, at worst, a cup of green tea, while Sotomayor was a potentially lethal margarita....She will be "modest" and deferential" and "limited" and also "respectful" and have an "open mind." But she also explains (it's subtle, but it's in there) that the reason her mentor, Thurgood Marshall, "revered" the court was because "in his life, in his great struggle for racial justice, the Supreme Court stood as the part of government that was most open to every American."...
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There is something achingly familiar about Monday afternoon's opening day of Solicitor General Elena Kagan's Supreme Court Senate confirmation hearings. The talking points on both sides—"liberal judicial activist" and "justices who understand real people"—are so overused that at first you think you just might be listening to the mix tape Chief Justice John Roberts prepared for Justice Samuel Alito's hearings. It's not just Kagan who's being interrogated, though: It's Thurgood Marshall, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Sonia Sotomayor. And it's not just that Republican and Democratic senators are applying the same boring old scripts to a brand new nominee. They're actually applying the same boring old scripts to the same boring old nominees.
If the hearing room feels a little bit airless, it's partly because it's full of ghosts....When Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, suggests Kagan had been "steeped in deeply held liberal principles," the contrast between this nominee and the last one is laid right there: Kagan is, at worst, a cup of green tea, while Sotomayor was a potentially lethal margarita....She will be "modest" and deferential" and "limited" and also "respectful" and have an "open mind." But she also explains (it's subtle, but it's in there) that the reason her mentor, Thurgood Marshall, "revered" the court was because "in his life, in his great struggle for racial justice, the Supreme Court stood as the part of government that was most open to every American."...