Tag Archives: Ed Morrissey

Kagan Competence Questioned

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Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey writes:

“Without any judicial experience, Kagan has to rely on her performance at the Court as Solicitor General over a short period of fifteen months — and at best, it’s mixed.”

Lack of preparation will out. Morrissey’s case for Kagan’s competence or incompetence to be on the Supreme Court is made based on her own bad:

ORAL ARGUMENT OF ELENA KAGAN

ON BEHALF OF THE APPELLEE GENERAL KAGAN: Mr. Chief Justice and may it please the Court:

I have three very quick points to make about the government position. The first is that this issue has a long history. For over 100 years Congress has made a judgment that corporations must be subject to special rules when they participate in elections and this Court has never questioned that judgment.

Number two –

JUSTICE SCALIA: Wait, wait, wait, wait. We never questioned it, but we never approved it, either.  And we gave some really weird interpretations to the Taft-Hartley Act in order to avoid confronting the question.

GENERAL KAGAN: I will repeat what I said, Justice Scalia: For 100 years this Court, faced with many opportunities to do so, left standing the legislation that is at issue in this case — first the contribution limits, then the expenditure limits that came in by way of Taft-Hartley — and then of course in Austin specifically approved those limits.

JUSTICE SCALIA: I don’t understand what you are saying. I mean, we are not a self — self-starting institution here. We only disapprove of something when somebody asks us to. And if there was no occasion for us to approve or disapprove, it proves nothing whatever that we didn’t disapprove it.

GENERAL KAGAN: Well, you are not a self-starting institution. But many litigants brought many cases to you in 1907 and onwards and in each case this Court turns down, declined the opportunity, to invalidate or otherwise interfere with this legislation.

JUSTICE KENNEDY: But that judgment was validated by Buckley’s contribution-expenditure line. And you’re correct if you look at contributions, but this is an expenditure case. And I think that it doesn’t clarify the situation to say that for100 years — to suggest that for 100 years we would have allowed expenditure limitations, which in order to work at all have to have a speaker-based distinction, exemption from media, content-based distinction, time-based distinction. We’ve never allowed that.

President Pass-the-Buck

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Ed Morrisey observes a tendency of our missing in action President:

“The modern American standard for political leadership was set by Harry Truman, who put a sign on his Oval Office desk that read, “The buck stops here.”  After almost a full year in office, Obama and his administration haven’t figured out that Americans expect that attitude from every President, and not a series of blamehifts to one’s predecessor, regardless of how unpopular he happened to be.  They expect not just leadership from a President, but visible leadership, a muscular sort of public presence that shows tough decision-making and command of the facts and concepts involved in the decisions.

Of course, many of us warned of this problem when the Democrats nominated a man who had never held executive office at any level for the toughest executive position in the world.  Obama has demonstrated all of the leadership one would expect from a legislative back-bencher, a man who passed the buck a lot more often than he held it at both the state and federal levels prior to winning the election last November.  He has passed the buck repeatedly this year, on Porkulus, ObamaCare, cap-and-trade, and would have done so on Afghanistan had there been anyone who could have handled it.  The Obama Way is the anti-Truman, and his falling approval rating reflects the fact that Americans have begun to discover that.”

Passing the buck is apparently tiring as Michelle Malkin observes in Poor Obama being President is Exhausting,

“Jetting off for Broadway dates, undeserved Peace Prizes, botched Crony-lympics bids, and world apology tours is hard work, don’t you know?”

“But what else did you expect from a man who has been phoning it in from the beginning of his brief political career as the Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times?

Americans can help alleviate the exhausted commander-in-chief’s discomfort by ensuring his retirement in 2012.”