An interesting narrative has arisen among some on the left that the nomination of Elena Kagan shows what chumps Democratic presidents are. That is, not only could President Obama have tapped a stronger “progressive” voice, but he — like President Clinton before him, and unlike Republican presidents — put avoiding political fights ahead of moving the Court left. Since LBJ, Democrats have opted for a “moderate technocrat” like Stephen Breyer rather than a “lion” like William Brennan or Thurgood Marshall. (Sonia Sotomayor was good and necessary for identity politics, the argument continues, but, let’s face it, she’s no liberal Scalia.)
Take this opening quote from a New York Times article that came out the day of the nominee’s announcement: “The selection of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to be the nation’s 112th justice extends a quarter-century pattern in which Republican presidents generally install strong conservatives on the Supreme Court while Democratic presidents pick candidates who often disappoint their liberal base.” Or Dahlia Lithwick’s op-ed in Slate about how liberal law students are so many lost sheep because their ideological heroes are deemed unconfirmable and therefore not part of the nomination discussion.
Well. A few things on this: First, even if the argument were true, it’s simply not statistically significant because we’re only talking four Democratic appointments (Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Clinton, Sotomayor and Kagan by Obama; poor Jimmy Carter had none, the same number George W. Bush would have had had he not been re-elected). Second, if you line up the Republican and Democratic nominees in recent decades, it’s conservatives who are disappointed (need I even mention John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter, let alone Earl Warren and Brennan himself, all Republican nominees). Third, to say that someone like Ginsburg — a push-the-envelope feminist and ACLU lawyer — is a moderate is to center the jurisprudential spectrum around the law faculty lounge. And fourth, as David Bernstein details, it is people like Richard Epstein — and other Federalist Society regulars like Dan Troy, Miguel Estrada, John Eastman, Frank Easterbrook, Stephen Bainbridge, and Todd Zywicki (as well as Cato’s own Roger Pilon, Randy Barnett, and Ilya Somin) — who would be considered filibusteringly beyond the pale, much more than Lithwick’s vaunted American Constitution Society stalwarts.
In short, if anything it is Republicans who can rightfully be disappointed in their presidents’ nominees — though Kennedy’s seat was of course originally to have been filled by Robert Bork. More unfortunately, it is libertarian law students who can lament that their kind lacks representation on the High Court — though note that the second choice for Kennedy’s seat was Douglas Ginsburg (the last judicial martyr of the drug war). And so, as the Court remains securely to the left of the American people, just today ratifying radical assertions of federal legislative and judicial power, Elena Kagan is poised to fit right into that jurisprudential “mainstream.” Good for the left, bad for the Constitution.
