The Myth That Justice Is Blind!

“With President Obama’s nomination of Elena Kagan to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, the choir has assembled to chant the mantra: ‘we are not supposed to know anything of her judicial predispositions.’ Questions designed to elicit indications of how she might rule on given cases are not to be asked. Lawyers, legal scholars, and judges — along with media lickspittles — will croon the liturgy. I have always regarded this proposition as so absurd on its face as to be unworthy of respect from intelligent, rational men and women. It takes an Ivy League college graduate to vigorously defend the idea. Think of the implications of this doctrine were it to be applied to advice you might seek from others in your daily life.”

It just seems to me so much a robotic performance on the part of selection, and she seems ill considered, more or less a mistake, maybe on purpose? Maybe they plan to present something worse? Whatever the case may be I find it a strange choice, but nothing out of the ordinary for a group of politicians with so much bias out in the open. Her conections to Goldman and LArry Summers make her out to be involved with the primary forces involved in gutting out societies in order to reshape them into some sort of war torn socialist nightmare in which the banks will further obfuscate the derivatives bubble by inflating further government bubbles to bring in higher taxes and more lending via inflation. Her ideas on free speech are horrid as well, but I don't think she represents a view unknown to anyone that has ventured ont a college campus in recent times, let alone the last 50 years. It would be nice to see actual questions instead of robotic sounding patty cake hearings.

WASHINGTON — A top prospect for the Supreme Court was a paid member of an advisory panel for the embattled investment firm Goldman Sachs, federal financial disclosures show.

Solicitor General Elena Kagan was a member of the Research Advisory Council of the Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute, according to the financial disclosures she filed when President Obama appointed her last year to her current post. Kagan served on the Goldman panel from 2005 through 2008, when she was dean of Harvard Law School, and received a $10,000 stipend for her service in 2008, her disclosure forms show.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/2010-04-26-kagan_N.htm

Elena Kagan agrees:

“The real “confirmation mess” is the gap that has opened between the Bork hearings and all others (not only for Justices Ginsburg and Breyer, but also, and perhaps especially, for Justices Kennedy, Souter, and Thomas). It is the degree to which the Senate has strayed from the Bork model. The Bork hearings presented to the public a serious discussion of the meaning of the Constitution, the role of the Court, and the views of the nominee; that discussion at once educated the public and allowed it to determine whether the nominee would move the Court in the proper direction. Subsequent hearings have presented to the public a vapid and hollow charade, in which repetition of platitudes has replaced discussion of viewpoints and personal anecdotes have supplanted legal analysis. Such hearings serve little educative function, except perhaps to reinforce lessons of cynicism that citizens often glean from government. Neither can such hearings contribute toward an evaluation of the Court and a determination whether the nominee would make it a better or worse institution. A process so empty may seem ever so tidy-muted, polite, and restrained-but all that good order comes at great cost.

And what is worse even than the hearings themselves is a necessary condition of them: the evident belief of many senators that serious substantive inquiry of nominees is usually not only inessential, but illegitimate-that their insistent questioning of Judge Bork was justified, if at all, by his overt “radicalism” and that a similar insistence with respect to other nominees, not so obviously “outside the mainstream,” would be improper. This belief is not so often or so clearly stated; but it underlies all that the Judiciary Committee now does with respect to Supreme Court nominations. It is one reason that senators accede to the evasive answers they now have received from five consecutive nominees. It is one reason that senators emphasize, even in posing questions, that they are asking the nominee only about philosophy and not at all about cases-in effect, inviting the nominee to spout legal theory, but to spurn any demonstration of what that theory might mean in practice. It is one reason that senators often act as if their inquiry were a presumption-as if they, mere politicians, have no right to ask a real lawyer (let alone a real judge) about what the law should look like and how it should work. What has happened is that the Senate has absorbed criticisms like Carter’s and, in so doing, has let slip the fundamental lesson of the Bork hearings: the essential rightness—the legitimacy and the desirability—of exploring a Supreme Court nominee’s set of constitutional views and commitments.”

The University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Spring, 1995), pp. 919-942

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