Second Thoughts

After reading all the hoopla in today’s New York papers regarding Elena Kagan’s nomination (and how great she, Hunter High School, etc. are), I’m afraid I feel the need to tear her down a little bit. My general feeling regarding Kagan is that she will be a dutiful Democratic appointee, as she is nothing if not a party girl. Yet she hails from the Clinton breed of Democrat of the go-go ‘90s, which discouragingly decided that they needed to be more like Republicans and rake in almost equally massive amounts of corporate booty. I get the sense that probably like a lot of cradle, idealistic Democrats, the more successful they become, the more they move away from their so-called core principles and inevitably accept the reality that to be an establishment Dem is to embrace the corporate slime that comes with it (I’m looking at you Rahm, Barack). So in essence, I believe she will invariably tow the party line, but in all likelihood she will be lacking in the progressive credentials that so many progressives have been having pipe dreams about. Certainly it is ironic and telling that two of the more liberal members of the court over the last forty years (Souter and Stevens) were nominated by Republican presidents, as Democrats would never dare nominate their ideological equivalents.