We have a new member of the Supreme Court. Congratulations to Elena Kagan, the fourth woman to ever serve as Supreme Court Justice, and the second to be nominated by Barack Obama. The vote was 63-37, with Democrat Ben Nelson voting against and Lindsey Graham, Dick Lugar, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins voting for. Kagan will replace John Paul Stevens, who is now ninety years old. Kagan won’t be ninety years-old until 2050. That gives you an idea of the potential influence Justice Kagan may have on the Court.
Of course, it’s too early to know what kind of influence she’ll have, but it will be exciting to see her get started.
Here are the birth dates for the nine Supreme Court Justices:
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: March 15, 1933
Antonin Scalia: March 11, 1936
Anthony Kennedy: July 23, 1936
Stephen Breyer: August 15, 1938
Clarence Thomas: June 23, 1948
Samuel Alito: April 1, 1950
Sonia Sotomayor: June 25, 1954
John Roberts: January 27, 1955
Elena Kagan: April 28, 1960
Ginsburg will probably retire before the 2012 presidential election to assure a Democrat can nominate her successor. Then it gets interesting. Assuming Obama wins a second term, Scalia and Kennedy will both be eighty years-old by the time that term is over. Can they both hang on that long? If they serve as long as John Paul Stevens, they can survive not only two full Obama terms, but another two terms by Biden or Clinton, and another two years after that.
I think it’s pretty clear to all of us that the GOP’s craziness isn’t going away any time soon. So that said, we really will hit a crisis point if/when Scalia or Kennedy or even Thomas retires or dies, and a Dem is in the White House. The GOP will lose. its. shit. They’ll refuse to confirm any Dem nominee and the government will, I don’t know, fall apart? Or less melodramatically, temporarily shut down? Who knows. But it’ll be damn interesting – a Constitutional lesson for us all, no doubt.
Hard to blame Franken for rolling his eyes.
Huh? The SCOTUS will just continue doing what it’s doing with 8 (it’s done so on cases before). A lot of ties should be interesting though. I’d say that would mean the lower court ruling stands?
yes a 4-4 vote means the court of appeals decision stands. but it also means that there is no supreme court precedent on the issue, even though there may be written opinions by the justices representing each of the 4 vote factions.
Yehaaw! Federal Circuit Court shopping.
Huh. Didn’t realize that even with Stevens’ retirement we have four justices over 70.
Congrats to Ms. Kagan. I liked her better than Sonya Sotomayor, but I think both will make great justices. Also congrats to Sens. Lugar, Snowe, Collins, Graham and Judd Gregg for having the guts to cross party lines and support Kagan.
One thing though, Ben Nelson is an idiot.
Prefer the Upper West Side to the Bronx and Greenwich Village, do ya?
Good to see that Kagan was confirmed although she would not have been my first (or even second) choice. There are better, more progressive judges out there. She doesn’t have a lot of courtroom experience and as a lawyer myself I find that troubling: there really is no substitute for experience in the law and working at Harvard as an administrator is not the kind of experience needed.
But let’s not cheer to much. Obama has been very slow, delinquent even, in getting people of a liberal, progressive persuasion into judicial type appointments. Remember Dawn Johnsen who Obama appointed to be Head of Legal Counsel (once held by the notorious John Yoo)? He appointed her but didn’t really support her and let her nomination “twist in the wind.”
Obama has done the same thing with several picks to the federal judiciary. One such person is Edward Chen, a highly respected judge in Northern California; another is Louis Butler, a Black American who served on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Obama picked those two maybe more than a year ago and has not really pushed them for confirmation.
Yes, GOP partisanship has something to do with this but not entirely as this excellent article from SF Gate points out:
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/08/05/ED8U1EPIE5.DTL#ixzz0vn9K0NDH
Democratic timidity is the right word. Obama simply has not shown enough fight (on this and other issues) and he may need to make some recess appointments to the judiciary, too. This administration has a poor record on putting liberals and progressives into judicial office despite overwhelming Democratic majorities in the Senate.
I think we’ve seen another problem with Romer resigning today from the head of the Council of Economic Advisers. She obviously had different ideas than Summers and Geithner and Obama doesn’t listen to her. Same problem. Obama has a tin ear even when we have 10% unemployment!
Oh yes. If only “we” would’ve been smart enough to elect Hillary instead. I mean we’d have some “true progressives” on the Court by now, like Justice Lanny Davis and/or Jamie Gorelick, that is if she would want to stop her current job as counsel for BP.
Now that Barack seems to have finished snorkeling down to that well and plugged it up with some of his leftover Wall Street cash, maybe he’ll get on with swinging his bully pulpit around to make sure Ben Nelson & Friends vote the way he wants them to. It’s so easy after all, right!?! Although you’re probably correct, Barack doesn’t like us little people, or our stinky, bratty kids, or our puppies, who he’d gladly sell for some more sweet, sweet Goldman cashish.
Yes, and surely when one of the first things Sotomayor did was to be one of the first Justices to question “corporate personhood” in generations, and how she’s already scoring as possibly the most left-leaning Justice, including more so than Republican John Paul Stevens, it’s all just been a ruse!
Thank you for your never-ending holding of Barack’s feet to the fire, although you know eventually you’re gonna run out wood. Just sayin’…
That’s some good quality snark! Hillary as a progressive? I put that baby to bed sometime in 2002.
You ARE Bonkers to consider Hillary as a progressive.
Good point to raise about the appallingly slow pace of confirmation for O’s lower fed ct nominees — and the lack of admin fight to push them forward or even make R stonewalling on them a campaign issue. The vast majority of Dems and midterm voters are probably completely unaware of the situation overall, and certainly w/r/t Chen.
Give Obama an A- for the two Scotus picks so far — both of whom look promising and potentially better than Clinton’s and JFK’s picks — but a D- on the lack of fight for these many other fed ct picks and Dawn Johnsen.
Don’t forget that John Roberts may or may not have epilepsy, so expecting long tenure from him may not be warranted.
Ben Nelson, worse than a Republican.
Exactly right, Voiceinthewilderness, because if Nelson was a Republican, at least we could put up a challenger.
On the other hand, if Obama knew what he was going (a big if), and if he used the powers of the presidency, and if he was a liberal and progressive (which he isn’t) he could freeze Nelson out of every White House party, make every appointment in Nebraska difficult for Nelson, and otherwise harm him. The fact that he has not (ditto here for Max Baucus and Lieberman) shows a lot about Obama and Rahm. Actually, I think Obama and Rahm’s thinking is more in line with Nelson, Lieberman and Baucus than it is say with Bernie Sanders, Russ¡ Feingold and even Tom Harkin. Obama really is a Blue Dog.
I’m not happy with Ben Nelson’ vote (or with his performance in general), but as a pragmatic, political matter, I don’t have a (big) problem with his vote on Kagan.
If he feels compelled to demonstrate his distance from “Washington Democrats”, better he do it on votes where he’s not needed.
fflambeau, it’s fine to be frustrated with and disappointed by some of the things Obama has done. But he’s not a Blue Dog, and you do your case harm by saying so.
Most good measures of Obama’s performance as a Senator (US and Illinois) place him pretty much in the middle of the Democratic caucus. That makes him, arguably, the most “left-wing” Democrat elected president in many decades (Clinton was a DLCer, Carter a centrist “outsider”, Johnson was Senate Majority Leader because all party factions trusted him, Kennedy was no liberal).
The middle of the Democratic caucus has shifted to the right since Clinton. The DLC has been very effective. Obama campaigning in 2008 was to the left of Clinton on some things, but as a president in practice he and Clinton match up pretty well on the left-right spectrum. He’s been more effective than Clinton in his first 2 years in office, but that’s mostly because Clinton was fighting with a Democratic Congressional caucus that was to his left while the Democratic Congressional caucus that Obama has been dealing with is more in tune with him.
Also, and more importantly, Obama has been extremely deferential to Congress (to the point where he gets excoriated for it by his base) while Clinton fought with them constantly. Which has allowed him to be more effective in getting some types of legislation passed even as it’s made things slow and made him seem “weak” as a leader. So more effective than Clinton, but not really more liberal in the outcomes.
Er – I should say “not really more liberal in the goals“. The outcomes have been more liberal than Clinton’s outcomes because he’s been more effective (i.e. Obama’s Health Care Reform vs. Clinton’s Health Care Reform proposal)
nonynony, thanks for the post. Just to state the obvious, definitions of “liberal” or “conservative” are contested and change over time. Assuming DADT is repealed in the coming months, that would signal that this President and Congress are, overall, more “liberal” than the presidents and congresses of the 1990s—as, indeed, the nation as a whole is on LGBT issues.
I agree that liberal and conservative change over time, but I don’t actually think that the repeal of DADT means that the congress really is more liberal now than it was in the 90s – what it signals is that the gay activist groups have done a damn fine job of pushing the issue of gay rights out from the left and into the center-left and even center-right of American politics. They’ve worked hard to make it as silly to consider “gay rights” a left-right issue as it is to consider “women’s suffrage” a left-right issue. Only members of the far-far right would consider women’s suffrage to be “leftist” rather than mainstream. Gay rights isn’t there yet, but the gay rights activists are moving it little by little every day.
IOW – they’ve worked to change the definition. Which is what good activists do – turn it from a polarizing issue to something that “just makes sense”. See also the NRA and its amazing work at affecting public opinion. See also the AARP.
And that just goes to emphasize why I don’t feel that Obama is more liberal than Clinton in practice – Clinton actually went out on a limb to push for inclusion in the military at a time when it wasn’t a mainstream position to take. Obama, despite the fact that there is more public support than ever for inclusion in the military, has not put any push on this. He has other priorities. Which is fine, but it really makes it hard to view him as substantially more liberal in any way than Clinton when the issue is less “left-wing” now than ever and yet he’s done less with it than Clinton tried to do back in the day.
Agree generally with your remarks, except to note that neither Clinton nor Obama, so far, have sought to risk very much politically to help lead on gay rights matters.
In 1992, Bill didn’t exactly put gays in military front and center in his campaign. In fact, afaik, it was born less from high-minded principle than from pure desperation politics — after the primaries, according to Bob Shrum, he was badly short of cash, and so made a certain promise to the well-funded LBGT comm’y which he may actually have thought he could fulfill. But it’s very unlikely Bill knew the actual awful political lay of the land on this issue during the campaign or prior to taking office. And once he took office he blundered badly on it by signaling to the Jnt Chiefs and Powell that it wasn’t a major issue he would fight for — giving them the encouragement to block his effort. Bill might have been well-intended, but he was negligent in the execution.
Obama has much more political leeway in which to act, and act more boldly and decisively on DADT and gay marriage. By now, Sen Nunn and Colin Powell have either done a 180 on the former or have signaled they’re not opposed to repealing it, while the country is moving in the direction, slowly but surely and not yet there, of near majority favoring equal rights for gays in marriage.
On this latter question, Obama is roughly comparable to where Pres Kennedy stood in mid-63 as the country slowly but surely was moving to favor CR for blacks — and JFK ended up acting boldly with his civil rts bill of June ’63. Obama has yet to show similar courage on the major civil rights issue of his era, and indeed is stuck on stupid with a horrible fence-straddling position, that impresses and pleases no one, on the gay marriage matter.
Can’t agree on DADT. For its time it was bold and cost Clinton much political capital. Those who disparage Clinton for the policy don’t understand what the military services were like before DADT. Being homosexual was a military crime and grounds for dismissal with bad paper. Gays were actively sought out, probably more than spies were. Being gay was worse than being a spy. Actual hate crimes against military gays were illegal on paper but the command structure turned a blind eye unless strongly pushed by a newspaper or congressman.
There’s courageously bold (e.g, JFK’s 1963 CR bill, or some would say Truman’s 1940s decision to deseg the military), knowing it’s either unpopular or going to be difficult to implement and could cost politically, and then there’s accidently bold, which is what might have happened with Clinton. At the time of making that promise to the LBGT group, I don’t think he knew the extent of the Joint Chiefs’ or Powell’s opposition, nor that of Sens Nunn and Byrd, until he sat down with them upon taking office, and Clinton hadn’t had to risk anything on the issue in 1992 because it didn’t come up in any major way.
Not exactly a clear case of a profile in courage, but not cowardly either. As I say, he blundered in the execution, and ended up with the compromise DADT — marginally better, but perhaps — perhaps — not as much as he could have gotten had he laid down the law firmly at that first JCS meeting and ordered Powell, in his best Harry Truman imitation, to get on board.
Massappeal, you’re assuming a lot because it is clear that Obama & Team have little empathy with gays and their rights. Obama passed “the buck” to Secretary Gates and the military for a reason.
I stand by my analysis that Obama is a Blue Dog Democrat. His first two picks to his administration: Rahm Emanuel and Timothy Geithner. That and the fact that he wanted the ultra right wing Judd Gredd in his cabinet say it all. Plus, Obama has never seriously even attempted to replaced W’s man at DOD, Robert Gates. That’s the most important position in government and he’s letting one of W’s people run the show.
Unlike you I see little substantive at all done by Obama. The “health insurance” reform bill is a Frankenstein disaster and will likely be held to be unconstitutional anyway. The financial reform bill is reform only in name and if you have a look at Bill Moyer’s program at PBS from last December, the one with Matt Taibbi being interviewed, you will see that Moyers himself said that Obama was undercutting real financial reform while simultaneously bashing “fat cat bankers” in the press. That is Obama over and over again: he’s all public relations.
Note too that Obama’s defense department budgets are 8% higher than W’s and that Obama has escalated the war in Afghanistan twice. The so-called reduction in Iraq is also a fake with combat soldiers simply being relabeled as noncombat soldiers and with many private mercenaries under hire who are not counted officially.
Obama punked liberals and progressives in 2008 and I(and many other progressives I know) no longer support him.
I hope a real Democrat (Russ Feingold for instance) primaries him in 2012. He’s a one-termer anyway. He will never win again in 2012 even if he gets the nomination.
I’m still confident that the GOP field in 2012 will be so dysfunctional that Pres. Obama should be able to get re-elected, even if the economy isn’t where it needs to be. This is why 2016 is going to be huge – and this cycle has played out before.
President Bush shored up the conservative wing of the court – moved the court to the right even – but he couldn’t produce an outright conservative majority. If McCain had been elected, then it would have been HIS job to create that conservative majority. President Bush reinforces the right, President McCain creates a conservative majority.
Now, we’re seeing it happen again…only for the left. President Obama is shoring up the liberal wing of the court – though he’s not really move it to the left at all. It will be Pres. Obama’s successor who has the chance to create an outright liberal majority. President Obama reinforces the left, President (Dem) creates a liberal majority.
I think whoever serves from 2016-2020 will get to replace one judge. If it’s a Dem, Kennedy may retire. If it’s a Rep, Scalia may go. Whoever serves 2020-2024 will likely replace the other of the two. If we get a 2-term Dem in office after 2-term Obama…we’ll see a vastly improved court that should be together for at least 2 decades.
Let’s also not forget Breyer. I think there’s an outside chance that he may choose to retire during Pres. Obama’s 2nd term, to ensure a Dem replaces him. This would mean likely 4 appointments to the SC by Pres. Obama. Craziness.
there is now a supreme court justice born in the same decade as me.
that’s a little depressing.
Clinton or Biden in 2016? Does this mean Chelsea and Beau?
Hillary and Joe don’t seem likely because of their age in 2016.
Who are the Democrats coming up who are now in their late 40s and are rising stars in the Democratic Party? Capable of the Presidency. (BTW, Al Franken will be marginally too old in 2016, so his fans should not get their hopes up.)
Check the traditional stepping stones:
Current or former Governor of New York
Current or former Governor of New Jersey
Current or former Governor of Ohio
Current or former Governor of California
Current or former US Senator
Retired victorious general
Now check the nontraditional stepping stones – other governors, members of Congress.
Do you see a farm team? I don’t see a farm team.
That concerns me.
Biden isn’t likely in 2016 not only for age (74 by then) but because he’s already made two pres’l runs, both anemic failures, one of them a disaster. HRC at age 69 by 2016 still is (barely) w/n the age window to run plausibly.
As for the farm team, I share those concerns. I have Sen Kirsten Gillibrand on that squad, maybe a Sen Sherrod Brown or Sen Whitehouse, but otherwise I quickly run out of names of those currently holding major office other than House Rep. Franken, besides the age factor, seems a work in progress in terms of self-discipline, though I greatly admire his passionate and principled stands on the issues and his knowledge of same. The CA situation is one where the older experienced pols are in the ascendancy — Pelosi, Brown, Boxer, DiFi.
6 yrs is a long time though in politics, and we saw how quickly Obama rose from being a mere state senator. Of course, he caught some huge key breaks in that rapid rise, didn’t he?
What were the main key breaks? Getting the speech in 2004 was the biggest in my opinion. Also, being clearly against the war in 2002 was pretty big. Just curious.
Those two, particularly not having to actually cast a vote on the Iraq War issue, when plenty of very smart and experienced Dems — many of them, like Obama, very ambitiously eyeing the top political job in the land — voted what was thought to be the cautious, safe way. Obama indicated in one set of remarks to the media (at the 2004 convention, iirc) that though he thought he would vote Nay, he actually couldn’t say for certain, given some of the intel info other senators were considering, how he would have voted.
That break, then in the 2004 senate race in IL, having the much stronger GOP primary winner, Ryan, have to drop out of the race (the embarrassing revelations leaked from his prior divorce/child custody hearing), only to be replaced by RW whack-job, MD resident Alan Keyes. Obama at that point just had to show up sober for the debates, do the usual campaign events w/o falling off the stage à la Bob Dole or Gary Bauer, then sit back on the sofa and watch the returns — nearly 70% of the vote statewide, not surprisingly given his weirdo opponent.
Yes, the 2004 spotlight keynote speech was another break, as you note.
I would probably add a final one, Hillary’s unforced and costly error in running a wildly overconfident, top-heavy, and unbelievably stodgy, orthogonian Experience Counts! campaign when even I knew 2008 clearly was going to be a year favoring a dynamic, JFKesque Change candidate.
Obama caught another huge break, Brodie, when the Democrats nominated John McCain. He was far too old, a horrible campaigner and no political strategist. Romney would have given Obama a far more difficult time and might actually have won but in 2008, just about any Democrat would have beaten any Republican. Indeed, that is why Obama positioned himself as a liberal and a progressive (to get the Democratic nomination) when in fact he is neither. Getting the Democratic nomination was the hard part, not winning the general election.
Clinton will be old, but it’s hers if she wants it. I can’t see anyone beating her a second time, and her time as Secretary of State will bolster her case for having the right kind of experience. As for the rest?
Mark Warner is at the top of the list. Among governors, Brian Schweitzer and Mike Beebe are more likely as running mates.
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