No surprise here. Yglesias preaches to the BDS choir. Fortunately, the American people are no longer taking the bait.
The demonization of Bush was an important element in the sequence of events that paved the way for Obama’s election. But Americans tend to think that there’s a statute of limitations on blaming your predecessor for everything, and that it ran out on Obama some time ago. But for Obama and his shills such as Yglesias, the buck never stops at Obama’s desk, only Bush’s.
Orin Kerr notes at Volokh.com that Kagan’s likely confirmation will mean that the Supreme Court will be entirely composed of Catholics and Jews, with no Protestant representation at all. Kerr has no overarching theory about this, except for the obvious one that Jews have been numerous in the legal profession and in liberal circles, and so it is hardly surprising that they would constitute the bulk of the Court’s left, despite their small numbers in the general population.
I agree; plus I would add that the Judaism itself has a long and illustrious legal tradition in general, from Leviticus to the Talmud and beyond.
But what about those Catholics? Kerr advances the following tentative idea, which sounds reasonable to me:
One possible hypothesis is that this is an indirect consequence of Roe. Given the Catholic church’s strong pro-life position, and the fact that Supreme Court nominees are not directly asked their view of such matters, affiliation with the Catholic church may be seen by Republican Administrations and conservative judicial groups as signaling a likelihood of a nominee’s view toward abortion rights while not providing any direct evidence that could itself cause controversy (given the wide range of views on abortion among self-identified Catholics).
So far I haven’t found any figures on whether Catholics are more likely than Protestants to go into law and the judiciary. But I note another statistic, most probably irrelevant but intriguing nonetheless: Jews and Catholics seem to have some sort of special linkage/relationship as compared to Jews and Protestants. It is a strange and little-remarked-on reality that Jews who marry Christians tend to marry Catholics disproportionately. The fictional “Abie’s Irish Rose” and TV’s “Bridget Loves Bernie” were popular demonstrations of this phenomenon. The Supreme Court appears to be no exception, although it’s hardly a love match between the liberal Jews and the mostly-conservative Catholics on its bench.
[NOTE: Here’s a much more serious exploration of the Christian denominations of SCOTUS Justices thoughout our history, containing the following interesting facts:
Throughout the court’s history, some groups””notably Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Unitarians, and Jews””have been significantly overrepresented in comparison to their prevalence in the American population, while other groups have been significantly underrepresented. Though Baptists constitute the country’s largest Protestant group, there have been just three Baptist justices. The second-largest Protestant group, Methodists, have supplied only five. There has never been a Pentecostal justice, despite that movement’s explosive growth since the Azusa Street Revival of 1906…
The mismatch between Supreme Court members and average Americans is in part an example of the generally non-representational nature of elites, even in the supposedly egalitarian United States. From the late eighteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, a white Protestant establishment held sway, as Congregationalists (the heirs of the New England Puritans), Episcopalians, and Presbyterians pretty much ran the country and the rest of America’s Christians pretty much let them. Unitarians, who controlled Harvard, got to participate heavily in governance as well, despite the fact that most Americans considered them heretics. The revivalist traditions that caught fire in the nineteenth century, including Baptists, Methodists, and Disciples of Christ, rapidly outstripped the establishment churches in membership but never overtook them in terms of cultural power. Evangelicals, for the most part descendents of the revivalists, have enjoyed even less access to the country’s most exclusive halls of power, including the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the presidential offices at Ivy League universities.
The makeup of the current Supreme Court also reflects trends peculiar to jurisprudence. Judaism and Catholicism have extremely long and rich legal traditions, while Protestantism generally, and evangelicalism specifically, does not. ]
Just when you think your expectations are already low enough, and nothing can further surprise you about the Obama administration and its appointees, something happens that proves you wrong.
Case in point: Attorney General Holder’s statement that—although he’s already opined on the possible unconstitutionality of the Arizona illegal immigration law, said it might usurp federal powers, and has called its passage “unfortunate”—he has not yet read it.
Let’s see: the Arizona law was signed on April 23, 2010, and was controversial—and legally controversial—from the start. Attorney General Holder’s “unfortunate” statement occurred on April 27, four days later, plenty of time to have read the law. And now the law is three weeks old, more than plenty of time.
Here is the law (plus some slightly amended language). It is neither especially long nor complex, as statutes go. The fact that Holder has not read it yet is unconscionable, bizarre, negligent, outrageous—especially since he has long been voicing an opinion on it in his official capacity as Attorney General. He seems to also be unaware that there would be anything odd or wrong about this time lag.
I noted during the recent Harvard Law School racial email incident that Dean Martha Minow had violated one of the most basic tenets any law school student learns at the outset of his/her career, from the very first day of class: to properly state the facts of the case. I wrote that, if I’d been a professor at Harvard Law and Minow was my student, I’d have given her an “F” for her response. And now I must say the same thing for Attorney General Holder, who has come to class woefully unprepared by not reading the statute that has been his assignment for the last three weeks.
But of course Holder is no student, and he has no excuse. The dog did not eat his homework. What did?
[NOTE: In an unrelated but equally incompetently handled matter, there’s also this from Holder.]
…so goes the 2010 US election?:
…[I]t does appear to many that within the Obama administration and the Democratic congressional leadership there is the sentiment that America would be a better place if it were more to resemble Western Europe…
And with Western Europe on the ropes, this could provide a political opportunity for the Republicans in the November elections…
Even before the European economic problems surfaced, Republicans were planning on using the debt issue this November to brand Democrats as fiscally irresponsible.
The European economic crisis is likely to make that argument more effective. With other nations in addition to Greece facing severe financial problems because of government overspending, the story isn’t going away any time soon.
This is couched as spin and “story.” But it is much more than that; it’s common sense. People who are looking, and who are not in denial, can easily see the connections between what’s happening in Europe and what is set to happen here, and would like to avoid a similar debacle if we possibly can. And voting Democratic just doesn’t seem to be the best way to go about doing that—in fact, au contraire.
I can’t remember a time when the relevance of European economic events to our own situation was more clear. As the article points out, this is partly a result of the growing (and purposeful) tendency of this country to resemble Europe in its economic policies and its government, especially during the Obama administration. But it is also partly a result of the greater unity of European national economies (the EU and the euro) themselves, partly a result of increasing globalization and interdependence of the entire world, and partly a result of the internet and the more widespread access to information about Europe making it easier to see the trends and resemblances.
The result is that many American voters are paying closer attention to Europe. We don’t want no steenking VAT taxes, either.
Just as in Britain Gordon Brown’s and his party’s lack of leadership and fiscal restraint paved the way for Labour’s decline and the Conservative semi-ascendance, so too do polls here reflect the growing support for the Republican Party.
How strong is that support? If sentiment on this blog is any indication, it’s a mixed bag. On the one hand, practically no one is all that keen on the Republicans, or all that trustful of them. They messed up fiscally when they had control of Congress in the early Bush years. They have their own scandals and corruptions. They often seem to lack leadership and fire in the belly. There are too many RINOs for many people’s tastes. But—and it’s a big “but”—the Democrats have so repulsed so many voters during their days of power, and especially since 2008, that although support for the Republicans is weak, dislike of the Democrats is so strong it ends up making Republican support fairly solid, if only as backlash.
WSJ authors Wallsten, Bendavid, and Spencer report that:
A big shift is evident among independents, who at this point in the 2006 campaign favored Democratic control of Congress rather than Republican control, 40% to 24%. In this poll, independents favored the GOP, 38% to 30%.
Suburban women favored Democratic control four years ago by a 24-point margin. In the latest survey, they narrowly favored Republicans winning the House. A similar turnaround was seen among voters 65 and older.
“This is the inverse of where we were four years ago, and in a way that projects to substantial Democratic losses in November,” Mr. McInturff said.
The new survey gives incumbents of either party little reason for comfort. Only about one in five respondents approved of the job Congress is doing.
And here’s the money quote [emphasis mine]:
Of those who want to see Republicans control the House, less than one-third said that was because they support the GOP and its candidates.
Rather, nearly two-thirds said they were motivated by opposition to Mr. Obama and Democratic policies…
“Both parties do things I disagree with,” Mr. Carter said. “But just to stop what’s going on now, I will vote Republican.”
One of the reasons this sentiment has become so widespread and so powerful is that Democrats don’t get it—or at least they don’t appear to get it. Witness this typical statement by a Democratic pollster quoted in the article:
Mr. Hart noted that, to his own party’s detriment, a series of major news events and legislative achievements””including passage of a sweeping health-care law, negotiating a nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia and making a quick arrest in the Times Square terrorism attempt””has not measurably increased support for Democrats. “A lot has happened,” he said, “but the basic dynamic of the 2010 elections seems almost set in concrete.”
What Mr. Hart doesn’t quite seem to understand is that those “achievements” as defined by the Democrats are seen as the exact opposite by the majority of Americans: debacles, sabotages, or incomplete and flawed policies that avoided being a failure only by chance (in the case of the Times Square bomber, for example, the alert actions of a street vendor, and the last-minute manual check of an updated no-fly list by the airplane staff).
The “lot” that has happened is mostly bad, and if the dynamic of the 2010 elections seems (barring unforeseeable developments) to be set in ever-hardening concrete, it’s because each event has solidified opposition to this administration and underlined its stubborn wrongheadedness—and statements such as Mr. Hart’s only further convince most of us that the Democrats are either incomprehensibly stupid or mendaciously and willfully destructive.
Or perhaps both.
[ADDENDUM: More from George Will.
And bringing home the bacon ain’t what it used to be. Incumbents beware.
Tony Blankley on the kind of Republicans we need. And it’s not the “business as usual” kind.]
And no doubt that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
You think babies are just selfish slugs? Think again. According to researcher Paul Bloom (the article is long, but worth reading in its entirety), they have a capacity for empathy, however rudimentary:
Human babies, notably, cry more to the cries of other babies than to tape recordings of their own crying, suggesting that they are responding to their awareness of someone else’s pain, not merely to a certain pitch of sound. Babies also seem to want to assuage the pain of others: once they have enough physical competence (starting at about 1 year old), they soothe others in distress by stroking and touching or by handing over a bottle or toy. There are individual differences, to be sure, in the intensity of response: some babies are great soothers; others don’t care as much. But the basic impulse seems common to all…
Some recent studies have explored the existence of behavior in toddlers that is “altruistic” in an even stronger sense ”” like when they give up their time and energy to help a stranger accomplish a difficult task.
I recall noticing some of this in my own son when he was about ten months old. We were visiting an acquaintance and her baby of the same age, and all four of us were sitting on their gravel driveway (why, I haven’t a clue). When her baby put a stone in his mouth against orders, she took it out and then slapped him. Her baby didn’t even blink; apparently he was used to such treatment.
I didn’t think hitting a ten-month-old was appropriate, but while I was mulling over whether to say something about it or not, my son was having the strongest reaction of all—you would have thought he’d been the one who’d been hit. He immediately let out a shriek of pain and began to cry as though his heart was breaking at the cruelty of it all.
The other mother seemed surprised. “My, isn’t he the sensitive one!” she said, and it was not a sign of approval. But my son actually was not overly sensitive; he was just unused to seeing mothers hit their babies, and although there’s no way to know, I believe it outraged him.
According to Bloom, it’s a possibility. With babies, nice guys don’t finish last:
We found that, given a choice, infants prefer a helpful character to a neutral one; and prefer a neutral character to one who hinders. This finding indicates that both inclinations are at work ”” babies are drawn to the nice guy and repelled by the mean guy. Again, these results were not subtle; babies almost always showed this pattern of response.
Even more interesting, perhaps, is the following:
When the target of the action was itself a good guy, babies preferred the puppet who was nice to it. This alone wasn’t very surprising, given that the other studies found an overall preference among babies for those who act nicely. What was more interesting was what happened when they watched the bad guy being rewarded or punished. Here they chose the punisher. Despite their overall preference for good actors over bad, then, babies are drawn to bad actors when those actors are punishing bad behavior.
The only really surprising thing about this is how early in life these reactions are exhibited. Anyone who observes children knows that—except for sociopaths and other character-disorded children—they may not be excessively moral, but they do expect the universe to be a place where justice reigns. In fact, quite a bit of the emotional life of abused children involves invoking order and justice in a world that seems otherwise devoid of it. Abused children often choose justice over the notion of chaos/injustice, preferring to believe themselves at fault and deserving of the mistreatment they get, rather than accepting that the world is often an unjust place in which the blameless are punished without cause by those in power.
[NOTE: The above essay made me think of a passage from Vikram Seth’s 1986 novel The Golden Gate. This astounding tour de force was written entirely in verse—specifically, the Pushkin-esque sonnet form having the unusual rhyme scheme ababccddeffegg.
And when I say “entirely” I mean entirely, including the table of contents, the acknowledgments, and the author’s bio, the last of which begins:
The author, Vikram Seth, directed
By Anne Freegood, his editor,
To draft a vita, has selected
The following salient facts for her:
In ’52, born in Calcutta.
8 lb. 1 oz. Was heard to utter
First words (“cat,” “mat”) at age of three…
I highly recommend The Golden Gate, which is dated in some of its themes but still remarkable in its unique achievement, and genuinely moving in many of its 590 stanzas. But here’s the aforementioned one about babies; obviously, Seth had not read Bloom’s research (although we can hardly blame him, since it had yet been done at the time Seth wrote this):
How ugly babies are! How heedless
Of all else than their bulging selves—
Like sumo wrestlers plush with needless
Kneadable flesh—like mutant elves,
Plump and vindictively nocturnal,
With lungs determined and infernal
(A pity that the blubbering blobs
Come unequipped with volume knobs),
And so intrinsically conservative,
A change of breast will make them squall
With no restraint or qualm at all.
Some think them cuddly, cute, and curvative.
Keep them, I say. Good luck to you;
No doubt you used to be one too.]
Obama and Kagan, whispering in the faculty lounge.
Does Kagan have that common touch?
Kagan was no pushover as a prof.
And Kagan is not gay, say friends. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The following qualifies as the single most humorous quote connected with Kagan’s sexual orientation. One of her best friends during her undergraduate days at Princeton was none other than the definitely-not-gay Eliot Spitzer, who weighs in on the Kagan matter:
“I did not go out with her, but other guys did,” he said in an email Tuesday night. “I don’t think it is my place to say more.”
[ADDENDUM: Jules Crittenden has more.]
This interview, in which Michael Totten interviews author Paul Berman about his new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, is well worth reading.
Here’s an excerpt from the description of the book at Amazon:
Twenty years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini called for the assassination of Salman Rushdie””and writers around the world instinctively rallied to Rushdie’s defense. Today, according to writer Paul Berman, “Rushdie has metastasized into an entire social class”””an ever-growing group of sharp-tongued critics of Islamist extremism, especially critics from Muslim backgrounds, who survive only because of pseudonyms and police protection. And yet, instead of being applauded, the Rushdies of today (people like Ayan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq) often find themselves dismissed as “strident” or as no better than fundamentalist themselves, and contrasted unfavorably with representatives of the Islamist movement who falsely claim to be “moderates.”
How did this happen? In THE FLIGHT OF THE INTELLECTUALS, Berman””“one of America’s leading public intellectuals” (Foreign Affairs)””conducts a searing examination into the intellectual atmosphere of the moment and shows how some of the West’s best thinkers and journalists have fumbled badly in their efforts to grapple with Islamist ideas and violence.
[NOTE: And here’s an old post of mine that’s relevant to one of the issues that came up during Totten and Berman’s wide-ranging discussion.]
[ADDENDUM: I was just remembering that, when the fatwa was first issued against Rushdie, it seemed so shocking and almost unbelievable. Now it’s like, “so, what else is new?” We have become quite accustomed to the mindset behind that sort of thinking.]
Do we yet have any idea what actually happened that day the market fell so precipitously?
[NOTE: This guy says he knows why it happened. But to me, his explanation sounds like “it happened because it happened.” Why did it begin at that particular moment? Why did it suddenly stop?
In my opinion, it seems to have been a very small black swan event.]
…and then there’s Yale and Harvard.
David Bernstein at Volokh wonders whether this Harvard-Yale thingee isn’t a bit much:
The president went to Harvard, and barely defeated a primary opponent who went to Yale. His predecessor went to Yale and Harvard, and defeated opponents who went to Yale and Harvard, and Harvard, respectively. The previous two presidents also went to Yale, with Bush I defeating another Harvard grad for the presidency. And once Elena Kagan gets confirmed, every Supreme Court Justice will have attended Harvard or Yale law schools.
Harvard and Yale do attract a great many good students. But they also help to create and then perpetuate a certain perspective, do they not? Don’t we want diversity? Let’s hear it for diversity!
And those on the left who think Elena Kagan isn’t liberal enough might be comforted that, at least back in 1980 as an about-to-be Princeton grad, she sure was. Here’s an excerpt from a letter to the editor she wrote in 1980, after Ronald Reagan’s election (neither a Harvard nor a Yale man be he):
Looking back on last Tuesday, I can see that our gut response ”” our emotion-packed conclusion that the world had gone mad, that liberalism was dead and that there was no longer any place for the ideals we held or the beliefs we espoused ”” was a false one. In my more rational moments, I can now argue that the next few years will be marked by American disillusionment with conservative programs and solutions, and that a new, revitalized, perhaps more leftist left will once again come to the fore. I can say in these moments that one election year does not the death of liberalism make and that 1980 might even help the liberal camp by forcing it to come to grips with the need for organization and unity. But somehow, one week after the election, these comforting thoughts do not last long. Self-pity still sneaks up, and I wonder how all this could possibly have happened and where on earth I’ll be able to get a job next year.
We know that Kagan’s job search ultimately went rather well, although not right away (after writing the letter, she attended Oxford and then Harvard Law). And of course we should not all be judged by sentiments expressed when we were seniors in college. But since Kagan hasn’t said much about her politics in recent years, there’s been little to redress the picture presented by this missive.
As far as Kagan’s legal writing output goes, Eugene Volokh notes that, although Kagan’s production of articles as a legal scholar was somewhat light when she was a law professor, it was within the acceptable range, and in his opinion its quality was quite high. And he’s actually read it, unlike the rest of us.
[NOTE: If you’re especially interested in learning more about Kagan, there’s a lot more information in many posts at Volokh.]
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President Obama has announced the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.
I can’t say it surprises me in any way, nor should it—this was telegraphed for quite some time—and I don’t think that this nominaton (or any other nomination he would have offered) is in any peril of not being approved by Congress. Nor do I think there’s any chance Kagan will become anything other than a reliably liberal vote on the Court.
Kagan represent several types of diversity: a woman, Jewish, and (if rumor be true—I have no idea whether it is and couldn’t care less either way) a lesbian. Whether these facts will inform her decisions (in the manner of that “wise latina,” Sotomayor) is anyone’s guess, since Kagan also would be the first Supreme Court Justice in nearly forty years with no judicial experience.
Here’s some further background on Kagan. In many ways, she sounds like a white, female Obama (or at least, Obama as he was presented to us during the campaign), albeit with somewhat better credentials. She’s known for “building consensus” and is generally pretty well-liked, although described as very strategic in her climb to the top. For a supposed legal scholar, her paper trail is almost as sparse as our president’s (and that’s saying something). She’s a Harvard Law graduate, worked as one of the Law Review’s editors (although not head honcho), and taught at the University of Chicago Law School at the same time a certain Barack Obama was there, although she was a full professor in a tenure track position (later becoming Dean of HLS). She’s been affiliated with some of the same boosters (judge Abner Mikva of Chicago in particular). And she’s even been a smoker, like Obama.
Although Kagan has kept pretty mum on politics, there are huge clues that she is very liberal. She was raised in the bosom of New York liberalism, and in one of her rare unguarded moments she divulged the following:
She had spent the summer of 1980 working to elect a liberal Democrat, Liz Holtzman, to the Senate. On Election Night, she drowned her sorrow in vodka and tonic as Ronald Reagan took the White House and Ms. Holtzman lost to “an ultraconservative machine politician,” she wrote, named Alfonse D’Amato.
“Where I grew up ”” on Manhattan’s Upper West Side ”” nobody ever admitted to voting for Republicans,” Ms. Kagan wrote, in a kind of Democrat’s lament. She described the Manhattan of her childhood, where those who won office were “real Democrats ”” not the closet Republicans that one sees so often these days but men and women committed to liberal principles and motivated by the ideal of an affirmative and compassionate government.”
No surprise whatsover there, either. Nor is it a surprise that Kagan wrote her Princeton thesis on the history of the American socialist movement from the beginning of the 20th century to the mid-thirties, under the direction of Sean Wilenz:
She titled the thesis “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933,” and used the acknowledgments to thank her brother Marc, whose “involvement in radical causes,” she wrote, “led me to explore the history of American radicalism in the hope of clarifying my own political ideas.”
In 153 pages, the paper examines why, despite the rise of the labor movement, the Socialist Party lost political traction in the United States ”” a loss that she attributed to fissures and feuding within the movement. “The story is a sad but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America,” she wrote.
If that sounds like a defense of socialism, Mr. Wilentz insists that is not the case.
“She was interested in it,” he said. “To study something is not to endorse it.”
Absolutely correct. But the rest of the quotations from Kagan on politics suggest she is indeed a woman of the left, although how far to the left is unknown. Like Obama, she has been careful to keep those politics well-hidden, and that makes it possible for the left to consider her too far to the right, and the right to consider her too far to the left. I happen to think the latter opinion will be the one that pans out as time goes on and she rules on the law as a Supreme Court Justice. But I also happen to think that anyone Obama would have nominated would have been, likewise, a person of the left.
That was a foregone conclusion from the moment of Obama’s election. In fact, it was one of the things I feared even before his election, when it looked as though he would be the winner and part of a huge Democratic wave:
That brings to mind the sort of thing I’m most concerned about this election””what Democrats (or any one party) can do with power. It’s not so much the possibility of an Obama Presidency””although that would be bad enough””but the possibility of an Obama Presidency plus a Congress so strongly Democratic that it might even be filibuster-proof. That combination could do very serious damage indeed. It’s also likely that several Supreme Court Justices will be appointed by the next President, which in the case of Obama would skew the makeup of the Court towards liberal activism for decades to come.
This is the prospect we face: all three branches dominated by the liberal side of the political coin, with no checks on their power but the ability of the people to vote them out next time in two of the branches. Even in the early years of the Bush administration when Republicans controlled all three branches of government, the conservative majority in the Court was very iffy and the breakdown in Congress was very close (at times a tie in the Senate). This time the power of the Democrats is likely to be far greater than that.
Speaking of “decades to come,” we get to one of the main reasons for the Kagan pick: her age. She’s fifty, and likely to be on the Court for a long long time. That is very much part of the Obama calculus in nominating her. The Democratic dominance of Congress may come to an end in 2010, and the presidency might change hands in 2012. But the composition of the Court is not subject to those vagaries, but only to the health of its Justices. Say what you will about John McCain; had he been elected, we would almost certainly have had a strongly conservative Court that would have lasted for decades. Now we will not, and that will be one of Obama’s lasting legacies.