John Paul Rollert: The Surprising Star at Elena Kagan's Hearing: Thurgood Marshall
[John Paul Rollert teaches business ethics and leadership at Harvard Summer School. He is pursuing a JD at Yale Law School and a PhD at The Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.]
The Kagan hearings were a sleepy affair. With no 12th-hour revelations and a candidate who acquitted herself as cagey and well qualified, the solicitor general proved adept at the kabuki dance of the Supreme Court confirmation process.
Yet there was one exception to the otherwise humdrum hearings: the bewildering decision by Republicans to taint Elena Kagan by her association with Thurgood Marshall.
Yes, that Thurgood Marshall – hero of the civil rights movement, mastermind of Brown v. Board of Education, and the first African-American Supreme Court justice.
If the senators had spent their time asking Ms. Kagan to indulge in fond reminiscences of her former boss, nobody would have blamed them, after all, Marshall is an American hero of the very first rank. But they didn’t, and the reason is that they were determined to make the late Marshall their lead witness for President Obama’s “empathy standard.”...
Read entire article at CS Monitor
The Kagan hearings were a sleepy affair. With no 12th-hour revelations and a candidate who acquitted herself as cagey and well qualified, the solicitor general proved adept at the kabuki dance of the Supreme Court confirmation process.
Yet there was one exception to the otherwise humdrum hearings: the bewildering decision by Republicans to taint Elena Kagan by her association with Thurgood Marshall.
Yes, that Thurgood Marshall – hero of the civil rights movement, mastermind of Brown v. Board of Education, and the first African-American Supreme Court justice.
If the senators had spent their time asking Ms. Kagan to indulge in fond reminiscences of her former boss, nobody would have blamed them, after all, Marshall is an American hero of the very first rank. But they didn’t, and the reason is that they were determined to make the late Marshall their lead witness for President Obama’s “empathy standard.”...