naked capitalism

attempter says:

Re NYT on Kagan:

It is gratifying that the president has nominated to this court what would be its third female justice, one who is relatively young, well spoken and, by all accounts, brilliant and collegial.

I have no idea what the substantive meaning of that gibberish is supposed to be, other than that “collegial” is usually code for “always eager to appease the Right.”

It may be unfair to blame Ms. Kagan for some of the positions she has taken as solicitor general, a job that requires her to defend the government’s views.

Unfair? Um, no. On the contrary, at least in the age of kleptocracy, the willingness to take such a job at all is strong evidence that one is primarily a flunkey of power.

Somebody tell the unprincipled and characterless hacks who make this kind of argument – it’s a condemnation of one’s (lack of)character that one would robotically “defend the government’s views” if she opposed them.

The White House undoubtedly hopes the ellipses in Ms. Kagan’s record will help her avoid a rocky confirmation hearing. That expedient approach, unfortunately, reflects the widespread sentiment that the right holds the upper hand in judicial debates, forcing the left to duck and cower.

Well, that means there’s no real “left” involved, but only the confident, aggressive right and the cowardly, quasi-right “liberals”. The real reason the Kagan-Miers comparison is probably wrong is simply that right-wingers will fight if they’re too obviously being screwed, as they did in the case of Miers, while so-called “progressives” are just snivelling little twerps where it comes to fighting for what they claim to believe. They’re actually more conformist and brainlessly tribalistic. The liberal teabaggers cave in to whatever Obama dictates even more readily than the right ever did for Bush.

Although I reject Kagan, it’s sure not because of her lack of the judicial credential. That’s meaningless. (I’ve been laughing at the astroturf articles trying to claim the Kagan-Miers comparision is wrong because she has better “credentials” than Miers. I sure don’t think Miers was less “qualified” than anybody else. It’s clear that formal credentials no longer mean anything. There’s no reason one even needs to formally be a lawyer at all to be truly qualified to sit on the court. Any generally well-educated, intelligent layman who cares about the public interest would be for that reason alone more qualified than anyone who sits there now.)

The real credential Kagan lacks is any solid record of what her constitutional principles are, if any. There’s plenty of law professors and legal commentators who’ve never been judges but who have a long record of writings making their positions clear. But Kagan has managed the improbable feat of having written very little of substance in such a long career. That has to signify that at her core she’s a careerist who has no strong principles at all, which doesn’t bode well for the fate of the public interest in her hands on the court.

Not that we should have expected any better. The “supreme” court is a rogue institution by now, and no one should repose faith in its fidelity to the constitution or to the public interest, or to anything but the power and wealth prerogatives of the elites. Just like the rest of the federal government, the court has no legitimacy and no authority. Only its might makes it “right”.