I am a bit stunned to find that not only are Ezra Klein and Bob Somerby nodding along with Bobo’s idiotic “anti-elitism” column but many of you are as well. What the fuck is wrong with some of you?
You have to go back to Reagan to find a president who didn’t have a Harvard or Yale degree and no one bitched about that. Why is it suddenly an issue with Kagan? Why is Kagan the hill for “anti-elitists” to die on, out of so many hills to choose from?
I just don’t get it.
steve
“good news for conservatives”!
/moron
stevie314159
1. Democrats missed the intra-party squabbling they so enjoyed during HCR.
2. Republicans love them some Sarah Palin hatin’ on smart people talk.
jayackroyd
It’s because they got nothing that is sticking. This won’t either.
bago
Apparently in cities you have to “do shit”, to “gain a reputation”, that can be traded for future “decision making”. As the senate proves, consensus does not come from agreement of a collection of individuals, but rather a collection of acres.
Goddamn uppity moose…
Speciesist!
aimai
The whole thing is so silly. Its like the anti kagan dems are playing catch up in the stupidest game of one downmanship in the world. They can’t even point to a particular, unsung, left wing genius from the backwoods–chaw in mouth, gun in hand, abortions on demand that they want to see on the court. Its just this hypothetical harvard/yale hate.
Something I wanted to say on the previous thread when someone said that (gasp) there’d be three NYC’ers on the bench (!) was christ on a cracker there are practically more people in NYC than in the entire of some states. Its a really, really, really, big talent pool to draw from. And don’t we already have five identical guys on the court *all of them white, male, catholic, conservatives from the east coast?*
Why is Kagan to be excluded because she’s from NYC when not a peep was made about the Catholicity of the court at a time when the Catholic Church has practically made itself a branch of the GOP?
aimai
Patriot 3
She’s so elite she’s probably got a real birth certificate.
She’s so elite she’s an Ivy Leaguer just like Bush and Rumsfeld. Well, Cheney too for one year before cut and run back to Wyoming.
She’s so elite the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court pre-season lineup will be:
Catholic 6
http://www.theonion.com/articles/pope-vows-to-get-church-pedophilia-down-to-accepta,17201/
Chosen 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14bv0-dzMIc&feature=related
Protesters 0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoP9cezikQk
superking
Doug, it’s not anti-elitism. It’s a recognition that the elite in this country extends beyond Harvard and Yale, especially in the legal field. Look, since lawyers are licensed on a state basis, many people choose to attend a law school in the state in which they want to practice. Lots of very intelligent and wholly qualified made a choice to not attend Harvard or Yale.
Furthermore, Harvard and Yale are sufficiently competitive that they reject people who are just as smart and hardworking as the people they actually admit.
No one is questioning that Harvard and Yale are bad schools, or people who attend them shouldn’t get a modicum of respect. The problem is that those schools influence in the federal government is completely outsized and disproportionate to their actual influence in the country.
Furthermore, in Kagan’s case, there isn’t much of an argument that she is qualified other than she attended Harvard and was Dean of Harvard Law. Those aren’t great qualifications, but some how we’re supposed to think she’s great because she went to Harvard. There’s something wrong with that.
Christian Sieber
Yglesias is indispensable on this matter as on many other things:
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/05/an-ivy-league-backlash.php
Steve M.
there are practically more people in NYC than in the entire of some states.
Not practically, Aimai — literally.
The population of NYC is estimated at a little over 8 million people. Only 11 of the 50 states have more poeple than NYC (and one of those 11 is, well, New York).
bob h
What the fuck is wrong with some of you?
Memories of rejection letters from Ivy, perhaps?
Bootlegger
If you have to ask, you must be one of Them.
@superking: I agree, the issue is the conceit that people not from those schools aren’t talented enough for the Supremes. But I’m not even sure its that, but rather the network ties people from the Ivies abuse in so many important sectors of our political and economic systems.
Alex S.
It’s always some hill to die on. There’s always something bringing on the apocalypse, or at least the collapse of western civilization.
Dervin
Elite is shorthand for “New York Jew.”
cleek
i never thought i’d see the day when attention-craving rage-addicts were being hyperbolic over trivialities.
frankdawg
Actually her background is not a reason I am disappointed with her appointment.
I can imagine people being concerned that the circle of decision makers is shrinking which could lead to fewer “outside” ideas and more “hew to the party line” thinking. Thats a guess.
El Cid
Why can’t we have a Real American from the Heartland on the Supreme Court, somebody like Elizabeth Hasselback?
mistermix
Bobo’s column doesn’t just accuse her of being an elitist — he’s also calling her a drone.
You mean you have to be focused and disciplined to get ahead in the world? Knock me over with a feather.
We didn’t nominate Elena Kagan to be Bobo’s girlfriend, so it doesn’t matter if she wants to be fucked by a man, or if she’s the kind of witty risk taker who would keep him entertained over cocktails.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Maybe if she started to wear a cowboy hat and bought a ranch in Texas – No, that would just turn the Is She or Isn’t She noise up to 911.
Speaking of which, I don’t recall anyone using the e-word in reference to Bush. Anyone who didn’t use it about him should be barred from using it ever again on pain of death by cock punch.
Seriously, they need to shut the fuck up.
Hunter Gathers
@El Cid: I demand that our next SCOTUS Judge be a white male who dropped out of school before the 6th grade, spent the next 20 years in a haze of booze, blow and pills, fathered seven children by seven different mothers, spent time in the joint and currently posts frequent insane diatribes on RedState. That’s the ‘real life experiences’ that Real Amuricans demand from those who sit on our highest court.
That and Kagan has lady parts, and refused to use her lady parts to sire children, therefore, any woman who doesn’t have children is therefore ‘elitist’. Why can’t she bow down to the cock like any other Real Amurican woman?
America – where we work extra hard to find shit to bitch about.
debbie
Since when did David Brooks present himself as a good old boy? Isn’t he considered a conservative “elite”?
Lisa K.
@aimai:
“there are practically more people in NYC than in the entire of some states”
Nothing “practically” about it. NYC has more people in it than my home state of Maine, plus NH, plus VT, plus RI, plus probably a few sparsly populated plains states.
Like Frank said, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Brains and talent are drawn there because that’s where the action is, not the other way around.
Some Guy
I agree with the general tenor of the point more than the specifics. Why the big deal about Kagan? She seems quite plausible on the face of it, but there are many unanswered questions. We need hearings and questioning to determine if there are any real problems with her.
There is no reason with Kagan to claim she is awful. None. She is not a sure thing on pet issues of various observers, ergo she must be awful. That is sloppy thinking and weak politics.
Under any circumstances Obama is not going to appoint a counter-Scalia. He is not that liberal, never has been. How people did not see that during the campaign still amazes me. He is neoliberal than liberal. That is what you get in the US these days.
cleek
@debbie:
being a student of Homo Americanus, Bobo knows that populism is all the rage these days. and like all good pundits, he wants to stay in the good people’s good graces.
Lisa K.
@debbie:
Not an Ivy League guy, though. Mere University of Chocago grad.
Tyro
Doug, it’s not anti-elitism. It’s a recognition that the elite in this country extends beyond Harvard and Yale, especially in the legal field.
Normally, I’d agree, but in the field of law, this just isn’t true. The elite gatekeeping institutions in terms of law firms and plum academic positions go to those who went to Harvard and Yale law and the rest of the top 10 schools and no one else, really. You can find people with lots of different backgrounds all over top levels of the Obama administration, but the SCOTUS justices are going to come from a narrow set of backgrounds because legal scholars and federal judges come from a narrow set of backgrounds.
Appoint polticians to the Supreme Court and that will change, but a lot of qualified politicians are also pretty old.
PaulW
@jayackroyd:
Jayackroyd has it right, with some editing:
They got nothing, period. It’s all fake outrage, all fake all the time. And the sh-t they should be outraged about – massive unemployment, financial ruin caused by our Wall St. CEO Oligarchs, religious/racial bigotry and ignorance threatening our communities – they dare not report on.
BR
@Dervin:
ding ding ding.
Of course in polite company they use terms like “elitist” and all Real Americans know what is meant.
WereBear
It’s the same reason corporations want to hire someone with a college degree, even though they will spend their first year as a receptionist or filing or working in the mailroom. That’s when they are really learning how the business works, and it doesn’t need a degree.
But the degree provides a minimum level of competence they don’t have to evaluate themselves.
It’s why networks form and get relied upon in the first place.
Bobby Thomson
@aimai:
Look, I get that you feel a need to respond aggressively to any and all criticism at this point, even criticism that will have no effect, positive or negative, on anyone. But you know very well both that you are stating a straw man and that there were definitely alternative “elitist” candidates (and non-candidates) floated that were not from the Yale-Harvard axis.
You would get more sympathy pointing out that even the anti-Kagan crowd had its Yale-Harvard favorites (e.g., Harold Koh) than in labeling Stanford, Chicago, Texas, etc. as “backwoods” or claiming that that’s even what people want.
SGEW
@superking:
I just didn’t want to live in New Haven for three years.
Bobby Thomson
@Tyro:
This isn’t a rebuttal. There are more than two schools in the top 10.
Also, too, your claim that the elite firms hire only from the top 10 is factually incorrect. Maybe back in the 50s, when firms didn’t hire the Joooos or the Catholics, either, but not now. First in your class is first in your class, and the smart firms realize that. That’s not to say that going to a top 2 school doesn’t improve your odds geometrically, but the idea that no high caliber people attend other institutions is just wrong.
Bobby Thomson
@Tyro:
This isn’t a rebuttal. There are more than two schools in the top 10.
Also, too, your claim that the elite firms hire only from the top 10 is factually incorrect. Maybe back in the 50s, when firms didn’t hire the Joooos or the Catholics, either, but not now. First in your class is first in your class, and the smart firms realize that. That’s not to say that going to a top 2 school doesn’t improve your odds geometrically, but the idea that no high caliber people attend other institutions is just wrong.
marion
The Republicans complaints that Kagan is too ‘elite’ are an echo of the late, great Sen. Roman Hruska who said (when it was pointed out that S Ct nominee Harold Carswell wasn’t very bright) ‘”Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.”
mistersnrub
She’s a Harvard grad that likes beer and cigars – Teabaggers’ heads must be hurtin’.
kay
@Tyro:
Well, okay, I’ll accept that, it seems to be true, but what about after law school? Is it okay to ask why she never took a job “on the ground” in law? As a prosecutor. As defense. In public interest law. Even for a short stint? It’s true of an awful lot of other justices, so I don’t mean to pick on Kagan, but is it okay to have a Supreme Court composed of people who never thought it was necessary to really grapple with these decisions they hand down? These are choices she made. There was nothing stopping her from going from prestigious clerkship(s) to a stint as an assistant prosecutor, or public defender, then on to law professor and dean. I think these experiences are important, would be important, and she chose not to pursue them.
I don’t want to concentrate on the law school, I have no problem with that, but what about after? This is a job. She has a resume. To my mind, that’s a gap, and it’s one that was entirely up to her not to pursue.
What about the other part of education, that comes after law school, and is up to the individual to pursue? I know it would be a sacrifice to be down in the trenches for a year or two or three, but why didn’t she step off the track and look around?
I think I can look at what she did after law school, and ask why she didn’t make some less conventional choices, again, if only in the interest of gaining actual practical knowledge of how theory plays out in practice. I would ask Roberts and Alito the same question, incidentally.
They’re obviously all really gifted people, and they got these extraordinary educations, and it’s like once they got them they never once touched down. That’s okay, if they’re private individuals, but is it okay for supreme court justices,where their decisions affect hundreds of millions, and have to be applied, in the trenches?
cleek
OK, what do “people” want ?
and more importantly, why do they think anybody involved in the decision-making process cares ? seriously.
Bobby Thomson
@aimai:
Being from NYC isn’t a particularly good reason to oppose her. But to answer your question, because nobody expected Obama’s predecessors to do anything differently and because IOKIYAR (With the exception of Sotomayor, the current Catholic justices were appointed by Junior, Poppy, and Reagan).
Consider also the possibility that the anti-Acela argument is the reassertion of WASP privilege under a new disguise.
valdivia
I really can’t believe this has now become a discussion about the merit of lawyers not from Yale or Harvard. Yeah tons of smart people go to Columbia Law School (gasp also in NYC) or Chicago or whatever but that is not the fucking point. The point is that now people are attacking Kagan because she worked hard and did the right things? And got the clerking jobs that guaranteed she would be considered for a judgeship?
If Harvard is so fucking bad maybe we should just impeach Obama since he is one of them.
Bobby Thomson
@cleek:
“People” want lots of different things. The original post painted with a broad brush and, other than Ezra and Bobo, didn’t say who the “people” were who pissed Doug off or what exactly they said. Kind of hard to have a discussion that way. As for my comment, it responded to a caricature suggesting that “people” want Cletus, the slack-jawed yokel. I respectfully suggest that in fact, the number of “people” who want that is smaller than the population of NYC.
valdivia
@kay:
but Kay NO ONE ever thought this was a valid question to ask Roberts and Alito because they were brilliant republican white men. Now that it is a democratic candidate for the Court who is a woman this is an issue? See to BoBo particularly on this who swooned over Roberts but now thinks Kagan is too fucking perfect and not risky enough in her life choices.
Hal
How many positions are there on the Supreme Court? And how many are open in any given year? I can’t figure out the odds, but winning the lotto might be more likely than becoming a Supreme Court Justice.
That means a very small window of people who would even be eligible are known enough to even be in contention for the SC. Combine that with the reputation of Harvard and Yale, and my guess is most people with an eye on any of the upper echelon courts in the country, including the SC, would probably aim for a Ivy over, say, University at Buffalo School of Law.
Tyro
what about after law school? Is it okay to ask why she never took a job “on the ground” in law? As a prosecutor. As defense. In public interest law. Even for a short stint?
I think those are all fair questions and a fair point of criticism against Kagan in contrast to Sotomayor. Keep in mind also that a lot of law professors have little interest in actually seeing the inside of a courtroom in the first place.
But in this day and age, our politicians groom federal judges from a young age, and they are praised for their detached “reverence for the law” which is always going to select against anyone with on the ground dealings with those subject to the law.
I don’t think that there is anything wrong with Kagan’s background: she did all that was typical of the very highest levels of the practice and study of law. I think the issue, such as it is, is that Obama decided to make his pick with strict adherence to the value system and expectations of the world of high level federal law rather than doing something different. The world of law has its own set of standards and values. Don’t blame Kagan for figuring our what they are and mastering those standards.
lawguy
It is certainly not an argument against Kagan, but it is kind of depressing to realize that apparently you now need to graduate from Yale or Harvard to be accepted into the Rulers Club.
More hardning of the arteries I guess.
kay
@valdivia:
I agree completely, but that’s not true of me, I asked them, and I’m asking again.
Why don’t these individuals, who are identified early as brilliant and most likely headed for a life-time appointment on a federal court feel any duty to step off and look around? In this field, where decisions they are going to be making have real world consequences? It’s not like it’s difficult, valdivia. Any one of them would be a shoo-in for a stint as an assistant prosecutor or a public defender.
That bothers me a little, particularly in the area of criminal law. One of the things I really liked about Sotomayor is that she was a prosecutor. Sonia Sotomayor has stood there while the shackled defendant was brought before the judge, and argued vigorously to deny him his freedom. I think that experience changes your perspective. She was wildly ambitious, and she knew she was moving up and out great, good going, I’m all for it, but she did that.
All I’m asking is why Kagan didn’t. She’d be an absolute gift to a public defenders office, for a year or two or three. She’s brilliant. And it would benefit her, that experience. I’m tougher on her because I believe she’s a liberal, and these things that liberals espouse aren’t just theory.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
I’m a bit stunned to see that you are surprised by this stuff. This is the Kagan version of the Wise Latina Objection.
These nominations are just backdrops for pundits and politicians to squeeze off wordturds of gratuitous nonsense on whatever subject they think is important at the moment. The resulting speeches and editorials mean nothing. Nothing at all.
Basically, Brooks wrote a piece that is the equivalent of “She’s short and fat. Can’t we find someone better looking?” Because he is what he is and does what he does.
Who cares? Seriously, who the fuck cares? She will be confirmed and be a fine justice.
de stijl
Bread and circuses.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@cleek: The Kagan Sex Tapes.
Mike Kay
WAIT A FUCKING MINUTE!
Somerby went to fucking Harvard, himself. He was Prince Albert Gore, Jr.’s fucking roommate.
WHO THE FUCK IS HE TO TALK ABOUT ELITISM.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@kay:
There is just no way that you can believe the crap you write.
mai naem
This is a one of the stupidest questions I have seen on a thread for a while because the answer is so simple.
It’s a nomination of a NYJooVaginaDemocrat by ScaryBlackKenyanMuslimUsurper who is also a Democrat.
kommrade reproductive vigor
I must say also2 that a large part of what gives Harvard (and the other Ivies & Sisters) an elitist reputation is the fact people fall to their knees in awe when they hear “Harvard.”
I’m not saying the reputation isn’t deserved, but if Harvard were to become a giant heaving cesspit and the faculty was made up entirely of gibbering shit-flinging chimps, 100 years later idiots like Bobo would STILL go all googly eyed and say Wow! Harvard! That’s really elitist! when confronted with an alum.
valdivia
@kay:
I think you are absolutely right. But the problem I have is not with you–please ask away, excellent points!–but with the people that did not give a hoot about this before but now are on Kagan’s case about this. A virtue in Roberts/Alito is now a vice in Kagan. Remember when Sotomayor was nominated people were arguing she was no Roberts, no intellectual star? Now we got ours and people are gripping. And remember too how the media narrative then was about how terrible and narrow it was to have all judges on the court? Now that we have a non judge people are bitching too. Nothing will be ever good enough.
I don’t have an answer as to why Kagan did not do this as you ask. She worked in public service, worked in govt took a different career track to me as an academic it makes sense, her career seems like what an academic might do to have a chance to be either a judge or an academic at the top of their field. If this was her ambition (and why shouldn’t it?) her choices make sense.
Shalimar
I’m not sure why all of the opponents individually have decided they don’t like Kagan. But all of this random searching for reasons like anti-elitism, lack of experience, saying nice things about Thurgood Marshall, etc. comes across as trying to convince others of things they don’t even believe themselves because whatever their real reason is may not be very convincing to anyone else.
Personally, there are excellent reasons to still be undecided about Kagan because she has done a good job of keeping her personal beliefs hidden over the years, but I don’t see even one decent reason why anyone would be vehemently opposed already. Yes, Obama could have nominated someone who is more openly liberal and I agree with those who wish he had, but he is president and it is his choice so that ship has sailed.
Will
Partisan politics is fun, especially when it gets liberals arguing that there absolutely nothing wrong with society being dominated by the graduates of two schools whose combined student population – graduate and undergraduate – is just slightly more than the University of Iowa, admits tons of legacy students and, frankly, seems to turn out bright people and dumbasses in about the same proportion of any large university.
I dig that going to Harvard or Yale doesn’t make you part of a hive mind and shouldn’t be used to disqualify any individual candidate, but the big picture is very worrisome. There are 360 million people in this country, many of whom are very bright and capable, but our leaders have decided that only a fraction’s fraction are worth admittance to the ranks of national leaders.
The cynic in me can’t help but suspect there’s a direct line between this and the willingness of our leaders to write off entire regions and communities in order to benefit the bottom line of those from the select few.
kay
@valdivia:
I have to say, too, valdivia, that it does go against Obama’s original argument for his standards for the SCOTUS. It does. He has said over and over that real world experiences affect judging. I think it’s true, and I think it’s a load of crap when Roberts denies it, with his silly umpire analogy. I know it’s true. I see it daily.
Obama opened the door to this line of inquiry. Unless I misunderstood him, in which case he probably has to flesh it out a little.
At the end of the day I am completely willing to listen to her, and I haven’t done that yet, but Obama shouldn’t be surprised that conservatives have seized on this. He told them to. He dared them to. He’s usually pretty good about admitting when he’s boxed himself in, and I’m sure he’ll come up with something persuasive, but it’s not an entirely unfair line of questioning.
valdivia
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
BoBo is just jealous cause he went to Chicago and never got over the fact that his school does not have the elan of Harvard (even if Chicago is probably as if not more serious in intellectual rigor).
El Cid
The stupid, fraudulent Bobo pulls out this ‘elitism’ shit on anything and everything liberal or Democratic. “Elitist” doesn’t mean “elite” in any sort of real sociological sense, but the Sarah Palin sense of not-Real-Amurkan shit.
flukebucket
There it is. In a nutshell.
Maude
@kay:
Hi Kay,
It could be they type of education Kagen wanted is why she went to Harvard.
A SC nominee with a background of defending poor people would not make it through confirmation.
The 2 class system is alive and well.
The Repubs would slaughter a “regular person”.
It would be: if she was such a good lawyer, why didn’t she go to Yale or Harvard?
We have a very long way to go before things are anywhere near even for those not of the monied class.
BTW, I though about what you wrote about Gibbs and the WH press.
The press room is different from Obama speaking.
The members of the press play gotcha, ask leading questions so that Gibbs will say something wrong and they also ask stupid fantasyland questions.
Fox News had Michael Brown on and allowed him to state that it was Obama that had the BP oil well in the GOM blown up to push his political agenda.
Fox didn’t refute or even question this assertion.
Gibbs had a set to with the Fox reporter that had allowed this to go out there uncontested.
The reporter whined, other reporters are asking…meaning that everyone wanted to know if it was true.
An out and out lie is taken as perhaps true and the WH press starts in on Gibbs to try to get him to make a mistake and then the gossip, ratings and most importantly, attention begin.
If the reporters were asking legitimate questions, then Gibbs would be out of line. That’s not what is happening in the press room.
valdivia
@kay:
I read him as making that case for Sotomayor. Do all his judges have to bring the exact same thing to the bench? Have the same background? He chose one judge for her bio and her real life experience and another because Roberts is a fucking extremist who needs a young counter weight on the court. I think making his defense of Sotomayor into a philosophy of all the judges he will ever consider is *us* boxing him in. I totally understand why he chose her and he is free to look for different things in different nominees.
John M
@Tyro: That’s an exaggeration that may be true in the Northeast but not everywhere. I looked at the academic profile of the circuit court of appeals that covers my state, the Seventh Circuit (Chicago-based, covers Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin) and it was more diverse than I expected. Among the active judges, the only law schools with two alumni are Yale and Indiana (Bloomington). Chicago, Harvard, Northwestern, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Texas, and Marquette have one each. Among senior (semi-retired) judges, there are two Marquette grads and one each from DePaul, Yale, George Washington, and Indiana. Of course, not every Court of Appeals judge is qualified for the Supreme Court, but certainly some graduates of non-Ivy law schools must have distinguished themselves on the bench while working with the sort of complex and contentious cases that reach the Supreme Court.
I generally agree with Doug’s post. I don’t oppose Kagan and I don’t understand why this suddenly matters now. Being a Harvard or Yale grad certainly is not a negative attribute for a Supreme Court justice, but it shouldn’t be a minimum requirement.
Mike Kay
by the time you read this comment, Field Marshal Kagan’s Tiger tanks will be rolling across Poland.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@valdivia: I thought it was pretty widely accepted that Chicago was harder to get into than Harvard. Perhaps we need a national day of shitting our pants over UofC grads?
Nah, who am I kidding? If Obama nominated someone who’d graduated from the University of the District of Columbia’s law school it would magically become the most elitist law school EVAR.
chopper
i agree with the idea that it would be nice to have a bit more diversity in the court in terms of law school. harvard and yale are not the only two law schools good enough to pump out eventual-scotus-judges.
that being said, it’s not like a degree from harvard gives you a different legal outlook (and you’ll make different constitutional decisions) than say, columbia or georgetown. it isn’t really necessarily substantive in any way.
Cerberus
It’s because they’ve got nothing.
And I’m someone who got accepted to an elite school and had to turn it down because there was no way in a thousand years I would have been able to pay for it. I’m also one of those “push everyone from the left” types.
I know why the right-wing is jumping all over it. “Elite”=”jew”. It’s their way of being able to go into their “jew heiress” criticisms while displaying their proud tradition of selectively forgetting incovenient realities and histories
The left? I don’t full understand it. Maybe it’s connected to a “fuck the rich” movement, maybe it’s people who had similar histories to me who resent the fact that they had to “step down” because of financial factors. I don’t know and frankly couldn’t care less.
Frankly, she a jewish woman with a decent track record of being sane so Roe v Wade would be safe. She’s got a good track record regarding publications and academic history of being someone thoroughly reality-based which speaks well of her on other issues. And she stood up in limited fashion for hated minorities with her handling of the DADT and military recruiters kerfuffle. And she’s young enough to hopefully last a good long while.
I’m not saying that I wouldn’t prefer Supreme Court nominee Noam Chomsky or his younger equivalent in dream “I want a pony” world, but Kagan seems like a solid pick who’s more likely than not to be a reliable liberal on the court.
And frankly, with the misogynists on the court currently, she’ll quickly be liberalized if she isn’t already considering even nutso O’Connor of Bush v Gore infamy ended up going sane side on a lot of decisions because of the whackjobs to the right.
In short, it’s a disgrace and I’m not saying that out of some “O-bot” worship the leader point of view as I’m one of those “push everyone from the left because that’s what a leftist activist does” types. But because this is literally insane gibberish rooted in obscure bs that has nothing to do with Kagan and isn’t even coherent enough to actually be an avenue to conversation on a good secondary issue.
djork
I was the perfect candidate until the Red State part.
El Cid
@Will: It’s not just about ‘qualification’ but about institutions which regularly integrate capable younger people into power elite positions. Like any such processes and institutions, it’s not monolithic or absolute, but it is part of upper class reproduction of power. Of course there are a ton of exceptions. Sometimes the institution actually is a direct part of the ruling class, and not successfully either.
kay
@Maude:
I’m not arguing the “regular person” thing. I think that’s nonsense. I think she should go to the best law school she gets into, and I don’t care where she was raised.
All I’m asking (and I’d add Roberts and the rest) is why they don’t step off for a year or two or three, in this field ( I understand this wouldn’t apply to the sciences, for example) because this field offers tons of opportunity to seek diverse in the trenches experience, and that experience would benefit both the profession and the future judge. Not for a career. She doesn’t have to grind away in a county prosecutors office for her whole life. Just touch down once in a while.
It bothers me a little that they don’t think that’s an important part of a resume. I think it is. None of them pursued that. Why not? Why isn’t it a priority, as much as getting a high score on the LSAT, or securing a clerkship?
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@djork:
You had me at haze of booze.
kay
@valdivia:
Well, there you go!
There’s his argument :)
Look, he knows how intensely rigid conservatives are. He probably knows that once he announces “the judge rule” he is then married to it forever and ever. All I’m saying is I am not surprised this is what they seized on. He tee’d it right up.
El Cid
Though I agree it’s a good general question, I don’t think this has a great deal to bear on Kagan.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
No fucking way you are not just making this up.
adolphus
@ lawguy
This is my problem, too. Not with Kagan or any one individual. She certainly seems like a likely candidate and based upon what I know of her would vote for her were I to have a vote.
And I am not a lawyer so cannot comment on how much better YLS and HLS are and how people who want to be high placed judges are most likely to go there. Sounds plausible. But doesn’t that system give you just a little pause? Are you comfortable with the gatekeepers to power in this country being so concentrated? That’s a lot of power to hand over to the admissions departments of two schools.
But just to go back to Dougj’s point that you have to go back to Reagan for a non-Harvard or Yale president. True, but you have to go back even further than that for an election cycle that did not contain one of two families. (not to mention other political dynasties like the Gores) That doesn’t make me hopeful about the direction of our democracy. Plus all the nepotism and inbreeding in the press and entertainment fields. Plus the ongoing decline of the middle class and growth of the income gaps between rich and poor and, as I said, I am not hopeful about the future of American democracy.
Again, I don’t hold that against Kagan (or Obama) and I don’t think it should be held against her. But pardon me if I see nothing good coming out of this trend were it to continue unabated regardless of which party enables it.
valdivia
@kay:
:) I am happy to give it to him for use in the coming days.
superking
@Tyro:
You’ve made half my point. The top ten law schools on the US News rankings are:
1. Yale
2. Harvard
3. Stanford
4. Columbia
5. University of Chicago
6. New York University
7. UC-Berkeley
8. UPenn
9. University of Michigan
10. University of Virginia.
And yet, the 9 Supreme Court justices (if Kagan is confirme) represent only three of these schools. Even if these were the only schools whose students ever got clerkships and plum jobs, there should be someone from Chicago or Berkeley or Stanford on the Court.
The problem with legal education is this assumption that the people who go to the top ten schools are necessarily better qualified than people who don’t go to those schools. That is not the case because, as I noted, lots of people choose to go to law schools in the state where they want to practice. It’s also problematic because what the top ten schools do really well is maintain connections between alumni in positions of power and their students.
I think a lot of us get the sense that some people at Harvard got places because of the people they knew and not their own talents. (See, for example, W. and the racist Harvard 3L who nonetheless has a clerkship with a federal judge.)
When we talk about elitism, it is silly to be angry at people who achieved something through their own intelligence and hard work–i.e. meritocratic successes–but people really ought to be frustrated with the good old boys network putting another one of its own into a position of power–even if the good old boys are sometimes Jewish women from New York.
kay
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:
No, actually I’m not. I would add that state judges do this. They’re ambitious, and they know they’re traveling toward a bench, but they all seem to put some time in, at some point, on the ground. It’s true for the appellate judges in my state. They run, and I back them (sometimes) and they all have a year or two or three where they sought out in the trenches experience. They didn’t have to do it. They showed up. They think it’s a good line on a resume, or they had a genuine interest, but they nearly all have it.
I guess your point is that’s far too much to ask of the best and brightest. I disagree. Not in this field. That’s valuable experience, and they passed on it.
bobbyk
What a crock of shit this post is. You are willfully misrepresenting what Somerby wrote. His problem isn’t that Kagan is an elite, his is with “career liberal” players. He’s been quite explicit about this over the years.
Violet
@lawguy:
I think this is the crux of the issue. I’m not some anti-elitist, but it does get a little discouraging to see that you had to go to Harvard of Yale to get a top job. It feels very inbred. Plus it seems completely against the things America is supposed to stand for – achievement on your own merits, etc.
Tyro
And I’m someone who got accepted to an elite school and had to turn it down because there was no way in a thousand years I would have been able to pay for it.
Huh? I don’t have a lot of friends with family money who went to law school, so the elite law students I know all got BigFirm jobs after graduation and then paid off their loans with their big $$$ salaries.
The alternative strategy is to realize that if you’re good enough to get accepted to an elite law school, you’re good enough to get a scholarship at a second tier law school and still land a good job if you finish near the top of your class.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@kay:
My point is that you are going on and on about something that is absolutely none of your business — the path another person took in her life — and has nothing to do with her capacity to do the job she has been nominated for.
That’s my point. What is your point? That you think sitting here are wagging a finger at this person for not taking the path you might choose is somehow useful?
ksmiami
Piping in – Kagan, as an educated urban professional woman represents the core of the Democratic party base and the Repubs really fuckin hate us. Been the same way since Roosevelt. /End of rant
kay
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:
I’d go further. She has an interest in administrative law. She wrote on it. How Clinton expanded the power of the executive in the area of Congressional vs Executive oversight and management of “agencies”. That’s HUGE, and it happens at the state level too, and no one in the public understands how vital “agencies” are to the mechanism of governing. It’s playing out right now in health care reform. The rule-writing.
Why not a year or two at an agency to see how her theory plays out, real world? In the course of her career, not instead of her career.
4jkb4ia
I suggest that it is because Harvard is Kagan’s qualification. Obama did not care that she was or was not a judge, nor should he have, but the magic of the name of “Harvard” is meant to point to all kinds of ability.
And I came here to point out that Ilya Somin has an article at Volokh about that Pew poll that the Reason writers discussed, but the link text has an unutterable word therein.
kay
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:
We disagree. I think it does have to do with her capacity to do this job. I’m a liberal. I think theory has real world consequences, and judges don’t just call balls and strikes. I have real world experience, and I’d swear on a bible that judges don’t just call balls and strikes.
You know, I just love how I’m now not permitted to look at her resume. I think it has gaps. You disagree. That makes me outrageous and unfair and a joke.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@kay:
Why don’t you ask her? Why are you pimping this irrelevant question here to people who had nothing to do with her choices?
Before you ask her, though, consider that the last time I asked somebody a question like that (a lawyer, actually) the answer I got was “I did what I wanted to do. I don’t owe anybody an explanation or an apology.” A baroque way of saying that it was none of my fucking business.
Oh, and I was 16, and didn’t have the sense not to question someone else’s life story. How old are you?
Ben JB
DougJ,
There seems to be some consensus here that these guys are making the “elitist” charge because they got nothing else to damage her with (and “elite” in America has always been a double-edged sword of praise for one’s accomplishments and criticism for not being a trailblazer or self-made).
I think it’s true that they have nothing else to say–there’s no “wise Latina” moment yet for them to latch on to–but also it’s easier for Bobo to stick to pondering about society than it is for him to actively research anything substantive about her legal or administrative career.
In other words, the lightness of the claim isn’t a flaw–it’s a feature.
But that doesn’t really explain why Klein would sign on to that. But I can’t seem to find the column of his that does agree with Bobo re: elite = bad. Does he really sign on to that?
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
That’s putting it mildly.
I think you are full of shit.
4jkb4ia
Somerby explained why he was going for it: he was against “career liberals” that didn’t lift a finger to help Al Gore. In other words, this ran into one of Somerby’s pet peeves which does not really apply to someone who worked in the Clinton administration and who Bill Clinton was happy not to hint should not be appointed in an interview.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
So am I. So I cancel you out.
Cerberus
@Tyro:
Not law, undergrad science (John Hopkins), but even with the “oh sure, you may have earned a billion kajillion dollars”, that would have severely limited me to needing to go into only the most lucrative of industry rather than pursuing what I wanted to.
Still find this whole argument inane and insane. She’s a jewish woman with a heavily academic background, she’ll be adding one hell of a different perspective to the Supreme Court.
Frankly, I think it’s all about bitching about the ruling class. Aka, a bunch of people pissed off that those who go to “elite schools” get the “big money jobs” right out of college and people angry about that rather than anything that has anything to do with Kagan.
And for those who think they have a point on the whole “concentration of power” thing. Having a slight advantage for certain law schools for Supreme Court positions is nothing compared to the whole dynasties problem and the fact that our Senate is literally acting like the House of Lords and European-style aristocracy.
In short, having a couple of poorer, actually hard-working people break into the “elite schools” and finally earn a shot at a position they have been historically excluded from is not at all comparable to the idea that someone can “go into their dad’s senate seat” a hell of a lot easier than most minorities and that’s a position that apparently doesn’t require the type of dense legal background of the Supreme Court.
In short, I don’t really get jumping on the Yale/Harvard temporary edge in the Supreme Court when our democracy is already being fucked seven times to Sunday in the Senate.
Bobby Thomson
@Ben JB:
Yeah, I can’t find it, either.
4jkb4ia
@Cerberus:
Ginsburg is a Jewish woman who was a law professor.
Cerberus
@kay:
Uh, her publications are online and she’s got a fantastic academic record. I mean, true, there could be an absent-minded professor situation, but her academic acumen seems to show someone with a deep grounding in the reality-based community on the subject she is an expert in, the law.
I could be wrong, but with the background, doing a little to stand up for an oppressed minority in regards to the DADT thing that the right-wing is trying to pillory her on, life history, and her academic record? She looks to be sane and highly unlikely to turn out to be a stealth conservative.
And most of all, directly grounded to the reality-based community.
She’s also, as a side note, suffered abuse and hatred, I guarantee it. You don’t rise to a prominent position at Harvard as a jew and a woman without the rich white legacy students seething at hate at the very thought of you.
Emma
Breaking cover here: I work at a law school, so let me give you some information which I am sure some of you already know. Every year the American Bar Association ranks law schools. The rankings are listed in US New ans World Report. These are the rankings for 2010. In spite of the usual annual grousing about “how they don’t say anything about the overall quality of the education”, the ranks are considered a serious, serious matter, especially for recruitment and fundraising.
If you are a bright, ambitious student, and/or passionate about the law, you shoot for the top five. Top two would be best. Sometimes, very, very bright students in the other schools are funneled into the top five for graduate law programs by professors in their JD programs. This creates a sort of web of inter-related people who know each other throughout their legal careers. They start to connect in law schools or in their first internship/job. It also means that high powered employers, who are plugged into the system from their own experience twenty years earlier, recruit from the web.
This system has existed for over, what, sixty years? And nobody has noticed until Elena Kagan was nominated? Spare me.
Cerberus
@4jkb4ia:
Yeah and she’s been on the sane wing of the bench. That’s why I’m not really worried.
matoko_chan
well….Kagan is a jewess.
that severely limits the things she can be attacked on by the right.
You have to consider how difficult it is for conservative populists in a meritocracy.
They have to pretend to disdain education and intelligence and science, while adamantly refusing to acknowledge those qualities define leadership in a meritocracy.
The right furiously attempts to co-opt Jefferson in spite of the fact he was an elite polymath and public intellectual that laid down the rules of the American meritocracy. Their re-imagining of Jefferson is like a mormon dead-baptism.
The real reason Obama is so hated by the right is that the President is a public intellectual, an elite AND a black man. Obama is the avatar of Jefferson’s natural aristoi ….the more he displays “talent” and “virtue” the more the white conservative christian grievance movement hates him. Their leadership promised them (along with 50 years of racebaiting and IQbaiting) that Obama could never happen.
And political affiliation is really social leveling.
The leveling the right/conservative affiliation offers in compensation is negative social capital for IQ and education….positive social capital for “commonsense” and “godsmartness”(religiosity) …conservative merit values…..in a sense the right is compensating for “intelligence” as a skill in a meritocracy. Conservatism is anti-intellectual and anti-elite.
The left/liberal affiliation offers social capital payoff in the form of IQ and education positive valuation, and offers social leveling on SES, race and environmental factors.
Thing is, neither affiliation can level the genes……yet. ;)
Its more game theory…rubberband theory actually….consumers are drawn to the game that offers them the best skillups for their playstyle.
4jkb4ia
@kay:
Well, she was on the Domestic Policy Council so her job was to coordinate those agencies.
Also you have to ask how much of a test it would be to work in an agency run by the Bush administration :)
kay
@Cerberus:
All granted. I’m not responding to the Right wing. These are my opinions, my issues and they don’t just apply to Kagan. I refuse to do my thinking in response to a stupid right wing meme.
As I’ve said repeatedly, I think high performers who are going into really powerful government positions have a near-duty to spend some time on the ground. They don’t. Would it be valuable if they did? I think it would.
Last summer, we got a really bright applicant from the (state’s) best law school. She wanted to work with us because she knows she’s headed for “greatness”, and her area of interest is juvenile law. She wanted to see how it works. She didn’t stay, we can’t pay her enough and the area is horrible for a single person, but we knew she wasn’t staying. You know, I’ll follow her, and if she’s ever up for judge, I’ll be cheering. She took this initiative herself. She went through the traditional crucible ‘o greatness, and deigned to drop in on us, real world, not for her career, but for her education. I admire that. If she writes juvenile law, as a legislator, she’ll have that experience. I think it’s important, but it’s not all me. She did.
T.R. Donoghue
@superking:
If you can get into HLS or Yale you’re going. You can practice wherever the hell you want, there’s only one HLS.
This is elitist on elitist violence. 2nd Tier Elites are sick and tired of their 1st Tier Elites. No one, not even Bobo or Ezra, actually wants a 2nd Tier law school grad on the Court – they want a Stanford or Michigan grad.
matoko_chan
rubberband theory in gaming is that the worse you play, the easier it gets, because the worse the player, the more ingame skillups are offered.
MarkJ
The issue is that this wasn’t an issue when Justices Thomas, Scalia, Roberts or Alito were nominated. They all went to Harvard or Yale law school.
Roberts went to a tony private high school and Harvard for both undergraduate and graduate degrees. Alito went to Princeton then Yale for law school. In what way are they any less elitist or more in touch with “the struggles of everyday Americans” than Kagan?
eemom
I have this much in common with Elena Kagan: she and I and every other middle class NYC kid at HCHS who went to Ivy League schools got in there ONLY because we worked our butts off to do it.
When we got there we found that more than a quarter of our classmates were fucking morons with C averages who got in because their daddies were old money “legacies.” (See Bush, George W.)
Brooks, Somerby, and all the rest of them can take their “elitist” diatribes and shove them up their smug assholes.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@eemom:
I love it when you talk like this.:-)
4jkb4ia
@Cerberus:
Cerberus, this is 2010. Some of those rich white legacy students are Jewish themselves. Or they have been to elite schools where Jews or Asian Americans are overrepresented.
Anecdotally my rabbi’s son-in-law considered HLS for some short period, which I assume he would not have done if it was not a safe environment. He chose social work school.
Maude
@kay:
The upper class looks down on the people who have real experience. It’s part of the ignorant self superiority.
It doesn’t make sense. It never has.
Look at the bankers defending being cheaters and how dare anyone accuse them.
It’s an attitude that is ingrained.
Reagan started this and it grew.
If an SC nominee worked in other real life areas, he/she would prolly be called a commie-pinko.
In long ago China, the longer your fingernails, the better you were. It meant that you didn’t have to work with your hands.
Emma
Kay: No, really you don’t want that. Most high-powered legal scholars do not really make good practicing attorneys.
One other thing: the only three people in the current SCOTUS who have any sort of “regular practice experience” are Kennedy (practiced from 1961-1975), and Sotomayor (major international commercial experience 1984-1992). For the rest, well, a couple of years if at all (Thomas worked for Monsanto for a couple of years in the 1970s IIRC).
When you’re appointing to the Supreme Court, you need people who can think about complicated issues and balance many points of view. One interesting bit about Kagan scholarship is that although not large it is very well respected. Her article on presidential administration is one of the top ten most cited papers. I think Volokh said it was cited something like 300 times. The First Amendment papers are considered serious heavy-going scholarship. She has the chops.
Like many of you, I was hoping for a more liberal appointment. But we didn’t get a dud,ok? I think she will go her own way, like Sotomayor.
cat48
If you elect a Harvard graduate, expect Harvard graduates in the government. That is where he made many friends. Don’t understand the shock that Harvard is running the gov. He certainly DID NOT pledge not to hire Harvard grads in ’08.
sparky
@Cerberus:
did you attend HLS? i did not but i would be extremely surprised if the above statement had any validity after about 1980.
@Emma: yup. and weren’t you polite!
i will also break cover just enough to say i have experience in this area, and thus will make this as brief as i can–
–many (most, really) successful lawyers are risk averse. most of them are career workhorses who toil away forever in comfortable offices after having reached whatever their particular pinnacle is–partner, professor, etc. they keep their heads down and do what they are told they need to do to get what they want. Kagan is a good example of this, and it’s why the question above (Kay?) is irrelevant in that world. it just isn’t done because it entails stepping off the careerist escalator, and that might be a risk.
–YLS and HLS have been the pinnacles (and gatekeepers) of the legal establishment for decades, or at this point, centuries. given the risk averseness and status avarice of lawyers and law students this is unlikely to change. inside the legal world you simply cannot and will not be hired for certain positions without an HLS or a YLS pedigree. HLS is the factory of the mandarin class; YLS is the factory of legal academics and government types.
now a couple of broader points.
–it may well be that the reason this complaint is the complaint du jour is because the Rs, as usual will throw anything in the hope that it sticks.
but if this sticks, IMO the reason this is sticking is that the unwashed masses have watched their betters sign over their tax dollars to themselves in the open over the last couple of years. in other words, it is now glaringly obvious that the US is an oligarchy. and this is, fairly or unfairly, simply another example of it in play. i think, perhaps because there are too many party faithful/operatives here, some of you are missing the growing public recognition that the “American Dream” is a lie. sure, some of that is caterwauling from people who don’t like Obama, and some of it is Rs, and some of it is idiots, but it doesn’t follow that because the solution is insane that there isn’t a problem that cannot be fixed by tinkering at the margins.
–for myself, i think this is a silly criticism to make of Kagan. that said, this is a deeply disappointing pick. my main objections are that she is too parochial intellectually and that it appears she is all in favor of the ever-enlarging State. her writing is fairly pedestrian, too. in other words, another “safe” pick.
kay
@Maude:
Is seeking diverse experience part of an education, particularly for lawyers, with the understanding that law school doesn’t teach anyone much about law?
I think it is.
I’m thrilled she went to a great law school. I think it’s great that she’s from NYC. Welcome aboard!
What I’m looking at are choices she made after law school, because she knew (I assume) she was headed was great things. You know, I am not alone in this opinion. The President and the First Lady talk about it incessantly. They believe it. Obama’s legal career shows it. They tell groups of young people that those young people have a near-duty to put some time in on the ground, as part of an education, prior to ascending to powerful positions.
I think that’s a great idea.
Cerberus
@kay:
Ah, the issue of broadening the life-experiences of college students.
Fully agree, and furthermore see it as a downright requirement for any damn college. Getting the mostly white, upper-middle-class base of any student body to learn about the history and life-experiences of those carefully cut out of their high school courses is a great requirement and should be mandatory and especially for career-based degrees, some required work on the frontlines near the poor should be required these days to ground them and give them at least a small taste of reality.
Has nothing to do with Kagan, but yes, it’s something I stand up for in all of my universities and I’m always part of any protests when an “unfavored ethnic studies” degree or department is being considered for the chopping block.
@4jkb4ia:
Indeed, it’s not a hill I’d die on and if this was a Republican nomination, I’d be far more worried owing to their history of finding someone nutcase to play their “affirmative action” candidate.
But, it isn’t, so I’m not worried. The likelihood that she’s a stealth nutjob versus the likelihood that she’ll be another Ginsburg are rather dramatically separated. I feel confident predicting plain-jane liberal as a 95% confidence interval.
sparky
@Emma: i pretty much agree (surprise!) with everything you say, but am not sure i agree with your conclusion. haven’t finished reading some of her stuff yet, but so far strikes me as rather pedestrian: able, but not interesting on its own merits. and as you know the legal academy well, i think you would agree that citing the HLS dean writing about her Clinton years is pretty much guaranteed to ring up lots of citations. everything i have seen so far says smart, but blinkered. in other words, meh.
Cerberus
@sparky:
I attended schools far more liberal and far less filled with rich, white bastards and still every woman of prominence was “a filthy dyke” and a “bitch” and “unqualified” and generally questioned and ridden a hell of a lot harder than any of her male peers. And among the barely a handful “Young Republicans” they were pretty much the anti-christ and they seethed with open hatred at the very thought of them.
Given the “everyone at Harvard knows she’s a dyke” crap on the threads this week, I even have direct evidence that she was hated and targeted for smear tactics.
Rich, white men don’t handle women in power well. Period.
kay
@sparky:
I don’t operate in that world, so I’ll take your word for it. I will say this, though. We’ve noticed a difference in younger people, both law students and lawyers, in the less-prestigious environs. They do seem willing to take a risk. They do seem willing to look around a bit. I encourage that. I think it’s a great idea, if they can swing it financially.
Things don’t have to stay the same. Individuals can change their own career choices, and doing that will make it acceptable for more people to take risk.
I have to say, too, that claiming that Elena Kagan would be harmed in her bid for the seat if she had spent some number of years in pursuit of different experiences simply isn’t true, in my view. She’d present it as public service, and no one in the Senate would demean that.
aimai
@kay:
I really think that’s absurd, Kay. Why does Kagan’s way of serving the law, or society, have to mirror yours or your version of an idealist’s version? I can well imagine that a person might choose teaching specifically because its seen as a form of service, or choose to become Dean because at that level you can have a real effect on rising stars in your profession–perhaps creating the conditions for more and better pro bono work. You have zero idea what kind of a person Kagan is or what she’s done with her opportunities or what kind of social conscience she has or has fostered among her students. There isn’t only one way of being a real true liberal, you know, or a real true moral lawyer–there are many paths to service that don’t require “stepping off” into a one or two year stint doing one thing or another.
Its also a totally weird notion that Kagan designed her whole career to get to the Supreme Court. You’d have to be nuts to do that and its highly unlikely that she “choose” perfectly to get to this position. To me this assumption is like the people who said that Obama was “lucky to be black” so he could “get the party’s nomination.” Give me a fucking break–Kagan made all her decisions about her career path like everyone does: accidentally, contingently, with fear and trembling, with luck and with skill. If Obama hadn’t been elected and McCain had gotten in she wouldn’t have received the nod this time. Up until the election she was simply leading her life forward, by guess, like everyone does. She wasn’t obligated to try to turn herself into a person pleasing every god damned stranger all over the country.
aimai
kay
@Cerberus:
Street-level lawyering is more like plumbing and less like water systems engineering. All I’m asking is a coupla years on the plumbing end. Then they go on.
sparky
@Cerberus: ok, fair enough, though you didn’t indicate that those were law schools. my experience has been quite different. i can say in the legal academic world it has been an unspoken fact for quite some time that it is to one’s advantage to be female. and i cannot remember sexual orientation ever being an issue except as to most schools protesting the military policies. perhaps that has changed.
Emma
Kay:She’d present it as public service, and no one in the Senate would demean that.
Honestly, you believe that? Watching the last few nomination fights, you really think the Republicans would not find fault with that? Have we already forgotten the “empathy” and “wise Latina” arguments?
Sparky: Like Volokh, I think any article less than 10 years old that garners over 300 cites has something going for it. Having said that, I just copied it yesterday. Haven’t started to read yet.
sparky
@kay: depends, i think, on what your career plans are.
–if you want to do government service, it’s certainly ok to be a prosecutor, because that, after all, is service to the state. legal services or defense, not so much. at the moment i am unable to think of a single prominent judge who did public service work that was not government-related. i’m not saying it’s impossible but i think it would be significantly more difficult. i cannot imagine anyone who worked for Legal Aid, say, being appointed to a circuit court. these are, after all, political appointments.
–i think while well-intentioned, your point actually would be much stronger if you argued that all lawyers took time between college and law school. in my experience one of the largest problems most lawyers are oblivious to is that most people manage to navigate most of the world without using lawyers. they don’t know that because they have never functioned as adults outside of the legal universe and so they rely on that mode of thinking far too much.
kay
@aimai:
I defend her, aimai. I think the elitist stuff is bullshit, and I really like what I’ve read so far. I do think people are ambitious and set their sights really high and I absolutely celebrate that. If I were her, I’d challenge conservatives to stand by their stated principles and celebrate her working her ass off and rising so high. I have no problem with career strategy, in other words. I didn’t have a problem with that in Sotomayor, and I don’t here.
I do have a right to an opinion on judges, though, and my opinion is in the trenches experience is valuable. I don’t think law school has one thing in common with real life. I didn’t hate it, but it’s got nothing to do with lawyering.
It’s not a deal-breaker. I’m not saying this is some new kay-imposed qualification. I like to see it. Just me. Not David Brooks, or asshole Sullivan.
I am leaning towards thinking she’s a good pick. Despite what I see as a hole in her resume.
Tyro
Keep in mind too that the system is supposedly working: Jews and Latinos and African-Americans had no chance of getting into Harvard or Yale law schools not too long ago, and now that they can get accepted, surprise, surprise, the top professionals of those minority groups have gone to those schools.
superking
@Cerberus:
Well, I for one have enough anger to be mad at both the Senate and the Supreme Court. =D
kay
@Emma:
Emma, why would I care how Republicans see her? I refuse to frame my whole life around these people.
I think it’s public service. I actually don’t, I think it benefits the lawyer more than “the public” but that’s how she could present it, and no normal person would object to it.
sparky
@aimai: agreed with much of what you say, but i differ on the careerist point. some people lust after supreme court positions. did she? i don’t know and don’t care. and she may be wonderful to students, though i don’t see how that’s relevant either. i do think it is safe to say that you don’t get to be dean (versus an academic appointment) at HLS by being independent, at least publicly. that seems relevant in evaluating what kind of person she would be on the court.
superking
@T.R. Donoghue:
Then where are the Stanford and Michigan grads?
Yossarian
“This is elitist on elitist violence. 2nd Tier Elites are sick and tired of their 1st Tier Elites. No one, not even Bobo or Ezra, actually wants a 2nd Tier law school grad on the Court – they want a Stanford or Michigan grad.”
Bing-fucking-o. To strongly imply that you would prefer there were a few more Chicago or Stanford law grads on the Court is fine, but to couch it in the language of pseudo-populism and “regular people” demonstrates a hilarious lack of self-awareness. “Michigan/Berkeley/University of Chicago si, “Harvard/Yale no!” Some revolution.
matoko_chan
@aimai: well….I think a lot of her behavior can be understood if she is a superrational.
I think Obama might be a superrational.
I have belonged to a blog for years that discusses the SSPD (single shot platonia dilemma). The blog consensus is that we are not sure a superrational can exist as a live human…the iterated Platonia Dilemma is very complex to think about…..but…..if they could exist…. superrationals would make great supreme court justices….and presidents.
;)
sparky
@Yossarian: could be, but i don’t think so. Brooks didn’t go to Chicago as a law student so that seems rather far-fetched. i think in his case it’s just a handy cudgel.
Tyro
There isn’t only one way of being a real true liberal, you know, or a real true moral lawyer
Dealing with liberals, I’m pretty sure that there is only one true way. Basically you have to take on more debt than you cam handle (or, alternately, only attend the local place that gave you a scholarship– either way, knowledge and understanding of how the financial aid process works and using it to your advantage is considered cheating). Then you have to get an underpaid job, preferably at a socially conscious non profit. Not that you will be doing anything socially valuable. You have to start out as an administrative assistant and then go on to “grant writer” or fundraising or something like that. The important thing is to end up in a life of genteel poverty but make sure it’s the kind that you’re professionally and academically trapped in. Miring yourself in debt to get you through your 9th year of your Comp. Lit. Ph.D. on your way to long-term adjuncting is acceptable as well.
That said, I would like to see a circuit court judge or a SCOTUS nominee who had a stint at the Legal Aid society instead of the DA’s office.
PanAmerican
@kay:
I worked with quite a few chem feed and water treatment techs. There wasn’t one who ever spent a day in plumbing. Companies don’t hire like that. Ability to unclog a toilet is irrelevant to rolling out a multi-million dollar skid feed.
I suppose to the uninformed it all looks like liquid and pipes.
4jkb4ia
A thumbnail description of Ivy League schools that I used was “up there with the best of the best”. Which leads to the observation that if someone was part of an elite unit in the military, it would not matter how much money they grew up with, this would be golden to either political party. In fact, there was commentary that Stevens was “the last veteran” and so on. Not to mention Mary’s frequent point that in all the bureaucratic wrangling over torture, the military lawyers were the most heroic as an institution.
IronyAbounds
Many of the big players in the financial crisis were Ivy Leaguers. I don’t find it a problem in the case of Kagan, but overall Ivy League grads have far too much influence, are far too full of themselves and far too disconnected from real life to be able to effectively govern the country or perform any real function other than pursue policies that benefit the elites. They really aren’t the best and the brightest, but simply the best connected.
Don K
Look, where Kagan went to law school isn’t a reason to oppose her. If she said she agreed wholeheartedly with the Bush-era detentions – now that would be a reason to oppose her.
Having said that, when we’re in a situation where only one of the members (Ginsburg) won’t have received a degree from either Harvard or Yale Law (Ginsburg started at Harvard, then transferred to Columbia), it’s symptomatic of how the top levels of the government have become a closed circle. In the private sector, the only places I’ve seen this kind of thinking (the only way too get ahead is to have gone to Harvard B-School or Wharton) is in I-banking and consulting. In my experience, companies that actually do things cast a wider net, and are more likely to base promotion on how well you do your job, not where you went to school.
I mean, it’s not like the only alternative to selecting Supremes from Harvard and Yale is to troll the graduation list from Ave Maria.
Emma
Kay: Because you are going into a nomination fight. You have to be prepared to rebut all the arguments that will be brought up against her, even the most stupid.
BUT to go back to the original argument. What you said was that “nobody in the Senate would demean that” (meaning public service). My point was that, yes, the Republicans would. They HAVE, with other people. I wasn’t saying we should use their measurements, and if that’s the way I came across, I apologize.
kay
@PanAmerican:
I love the plumbing analogy, so I’m sticking with it :)
Despite your real-world objections.
If I could design a SCOTUS resume, this is what I’d write. Elena Kagan does not have to hew to my standards. I’m leaning toward being happier with her, because I read a little last night. Still, this is an issue to me, and it was an issue with Roberts and Alito, so I’m not picking on her.
Apparently, my resume ideal is “not realistic” although I believe experience is relevant, you know, to me.
kay
@Emma:
Oh, I agree. The community organizer crap. That worked out well for them. They lost.
Public service won.
taylormattd
@superking: Wow, what a stupid fucking comment.
I love how people completely and utterly ignore the fact that she was a professor, and that she is currently the Solicitor Fucking General.
Yeah, just terrible experience.
NickM
I am a labor lawyer who represents a union. Our labor laws need a serious update, but even the old broken-down laws that we do have are often impossible to get a judge to actually enforce as written. Part of the problem is that judges typically have no experience with and no sympathy for working people or unions, and plenty of experience with corporations and the big firms that represent them. They come increasing from one very narrow class and cluster of experiences, and their clerks even more so. You wind up trying to enforce laws drafted in the 1930’s, based on then-common notions about the rights of labor, to a bunch of people who think like McMegan with lifetime tenure (redundant). Kagan is not the problem, she looks pretty good, etc. but I totally get that many on the left might be feeling pretty fed up with a system where no matter if Dems or Republicans win or lose, the “elite” always wins.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
I am hearing a lot of one dimensional logic in arguments concerning Ms Kagan, or, she may be too conformist to power, and maybe a careerist and self protective of her image, or something like that.
Take her stint as Dean of HLS. What did she do there? We have heard pining from some left quarters that she didn’t hire enough minorities, or may not support diversity. By all accounts she is described as very bright and seemingly self aware and aware of the liberal environment she operates in as a dem and liberal progressive, or whatever.
I have read she intended to reach out and hire more conservatives to enter the deeply liberal faculty trenches at Harvard. Why would she do such a thing, hire white male attorney’s in larger numbers than anything else. Some have pondered this could be cause she is a closet conservative, but there is not much in her other professional life to support such a claim. But on the surface, it looks like that could be the case. What if it wasn’t. What if she saw diversity, particularly at a deep blue Ivy League law school, as relating to ideology, or a lack of diversity in that regard.
For that you usually find white males, as we always hear from left wing quarters. What if that was her goal? Wouldn’t that be unsafe for a liberal to do? Wouldn’t it be kind of brave, actually? She certainly is smart enough to at some point during hiring all these white males, to realize people of the left might talk and conclude what some are concluding. These are the problems in teasing out peoples motives from afar, until they have a chance to be directly asked with the opportunity to answer for themselves, particularly under oath.
kay
@NickM:
Thanks for weighing in. It’s important, is it not?
Not a deal-breaker, as you admitted, but certainly a question we can ask.
aimai
I’m all for legal aid and public service and pro bono work–in fact the law students at Tulane have apparently done such incredibly good work through their law clinics on environmental matters and law suits they’ve brought that local politicians are passing a law to prevent them from doing so. But its not the only way to get things done, legally or morally. And not only that but its also quintessentially the kind of thing that people with trust funds can do that people without can’t afford to do. The whole discussion of “stepping off the career path” reminds me of the valorization of the “summer internship” and the “gap year” in which the rich kid whose parents can afford to pay for everything gets to write wonderful papers about “my year herding sheep in the catalan outback” while the actual scholarship kid who struggled to get to the big leagues has to work days and nights flipping burgers at the Double Meat Palace just to stay afloat.
Incidentally, I attended the Bill of Rights dinner two years ago where Katyal and Swift were honored. The room was absolutely busting at the seams with white shoe lawyers who had gone down to Guantanamo for years to fight for their clients pro bono. Legal Aid is great, tenants rights is great (I know plenty of people who make a permanent non living doing that stuff) but there’s lots of realms of the law that are, in fact, very rarified and worth doing that don’t get done just for “one or two years” in between law school and starting to pay off your debts.
I just don’t get these arguments–which we had when Sotomayor was selected–over who is the “best” person for the Supreme Court. There are literally thousands of people who would be great, theoretically, and possibly half or more of those would be great really (that is, would do a great job on the court as presently constituted and into the foreseeable future as the court changes in composition.) There isn’t one perfect person. We just have to cross our fingers and hope that the person selected grows into the power–its a totally different position from any other, legally, and its going to have unintended and unforseen consequences on the person. The notion that Kagan has been conventional and compromising up until now so that she will end up deferring to Scalia et al is totally absurd.
Also, the notion of “supperrational” matoko chan, is also absurd. Since *outside of math* there isn’t a single answer to every question there is never a single form of rational reasoning that will force each person to the same conclusion by the same steps. Obama may be quite rational–if by that you mean seemingly emotionally detached from the argument–but he isn’t “supperrational” and his conclusions aren’t perfect, like a proof, but contingent, flawed, and perfectly human like everyone elses’s.
aimai
Emma
it’s symptomatic of how the top levels of the government have become a closed circle.
I decided to look at little into it, and I find that Obama’s cabinet is quite diverse, if loaded with the top of the line schools, as I would expect them to be, but here goes:
Clinton (Yale); Gates (Georgetown); Rice (Stanford, Oxford); Blair (Naval Academy); Panetta (UC Santa Cruz); Jones (Georgetown, National War College); Holder (Columbia); Napolitano (UVa); Solis (USC); LaHood (Bradley); Vilsack (Albany Law); Salazar (UMichigan); Duncan (Harvard, not law); Donovan (Harvard); Shinseki (Duke, Army College); Gregg (Boston U); Barnes (UMichigan).
And I didn’t even look into the White House staff.
So how did we get this elitist meme going?
kay
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
“Careerist” is a bullshit term, and only applied to ambitious women, so I reject that.
Plus, Andrew Sullivan uses it, so right there it’s suspect.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@kay: I was only relating what I have been reading of Kagan complaints from a number of sources, including Sullivan. I don’t even know what the term is supposed to mean, every person who chooses a career is a “careerist” of sorts.
Alan in SF
@aimai:
Uh….Diane Wood?
Ron
@superking: How is being Dean of Harvard Law NOT a great qualification?
kay
@aimai:
My point is simply that there are only 9 slots, and my opinion is that the “rarified” areas of law have sufficient representation and experience on the Court. We got Alito as a former US Attorney (a prized slot) we have academics, we have Justice Roberts fighting valiantly for the “corporate form” and I am of the opinion that maybe the less rarified areas could use some attention.
I’m pleased with Kagan because she has an interest in administrative law, rule-writing and regulatory role. That’s an area that’s not well represented, because it’s what Clarence Thomas came with, and he essentially doesn’t believe it should exist, at all. So that’s a good point on her resume.
Corner Stone
@aimai:
And that’s my problem with these kind of complaints as well.
It didn’t matter if I was “destined” for greatness and knew it. Or was ambitious and had a great plan. I didn’t have a choice at some critical points, just like most people without legacy money.
It seems a little “Undercover CEO” to me, and fatally unrealistic.
sparky
@Ron: it’s not a great qualification to be on the supreme court because the two positions don’t have much in common, and the skill sets (if i may use a crap term) are not similar.
oh and if you want an example of a significantly better pick, how about Elizabeth Warren? the point people like me are trying to make is that with Obama, it’s as if he goes out of his way to pick people whose best qualification for the position seems to be their ability to be confirmed. you can call it whatever you wish but it is not leadership.
aimai
@Alan in SF:
I think you mean “Clarence Thomas”? My error. Of the five Conservative Catholics on the court only four are “white males” and the fifth is Thomas, while the sixth is theoretically not a conservative Catholic and that is Sotomayor.
aimai
Corner Stone
@NickM:
Just like other elected/appointed officials, judges rotate in and out of Big Business and Big Law when not in office.
There’s a reason they don’t have any sympathy for the working guy. It doesn’t pay them to.
Corner Stone
@Bobby Thomson:
It was obvious he’s trolling his own blog again. Use of the word “fuck” on the front page? The classic John Cole-esque “hill to die on” trope?
Obvious.
debbie
@Cerebus:
I suppose conservatives won’t be happy until Joe the Plumber is nominated.
And all this talk about Kagan’s experience/non-experience or having to be a prosecutor. (And isn’t Solicitor General a kind of prosecutor?) Didn’t Sotomayor get grief because her judicial background was thought to be too adversarial? Talk about looking for reasons to bitch!
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@sparky:
Oh stop it. Obama has known this woman for years and is obviously impressed with her and sees something like what he wants in a SCOTUS. You on the other hand, don’t have a clue, other than who you would personally pick if the POTUS, which thankfully is not the case. I will trust Obama’s judgment on this over concerned progressives every day of the week. If she bombs in the confirmation process, then I will switch to oppose her.
Corner Stone
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
Maybe it’s selective sample bias, but lately I’ve been wondering if everyone in the world graduated from Harvard or HLS. It seems like a damn diploma factory up there.
How does it maintain it’s “elite” status when they seem to let any damn body graduate from there?
Lihtox
@chopper: Well, I don’t know: it makes sense to me that law school faculties might develop different points of view on the law, just as we have the “Chicago School of Economics”. Faculty members within a given law school presumably talk to each other a lot, and might come to some sort of consensus opinion which they then pass on to their students (who at least learn to give lip service to those opinions, because they want to do well). It seems really likely that, on average, a graduate of Columbia Law would have a different outlook compared to a graduate of Harvard Law or Yale Law.
I’m being vague because I have no idea how law schools work; maybe I’m completely off-base. I think it’s an issue worth considering in the abstract; I don’t think any nominee should be *dis*qualified because they are from Harvard/Yale (or are white or male or from NYC or Catholic), but diversity might be taken into consideration in later Supreme Court picks (as long as it doesn’t trump competence and intelligence).
MCA
Question: which do we prefer:
1. The promotion of people who, regardless of how they got in to Harvard and Yale, excelled there through kicking ass in their studies and working really hard to edit the Law Review and finish at the top of their class, thus displaying true talent and work ethic; or
2. The contrarian promotion of “real people” to places of extremely high import in our society, so as to break the elite’s grip on power?
In a vacuum, that’s a tough call that could be argued either way. In reality, however, it seems to me that choosing door No. 2 means we get Regent Law School grads populating the Justice Department, and Sarah Palin on the verge of being Vice President. So, I’ll take Door No. 1, despite the closed circle it perpetuates, and the fact that law schools that pump out lots of scholars that can compete in brain power with those from Harvard and Yale are habitually not represented on the Supreme Court. And I went to one of those non-represented competitors. I’d trade never having a Michigan Law grad on the Supreme Court for never having a real ‘mercan like Palin foisted on my tender ears for the rest of my life, no questions asked. Elitism is a natural byproduct of not only aristocratic systems, but meritocratic, too. Better than idiocracy. We can work on diversifying the shades of elite on the Supreme Court in the background, but let’s save it for when we’re not talking about an actual, live nominee.
As an aside, as a member of the alumni of one of those second tier of the first tier law schools, I would say that, in fact, there’s probably more to the distinctions made in the judicial world between grads of Yale and Harvard (and maybe UofC) and those of everywhere else than non-lawyers may think. If your goal, as a senior in college, is to go to law school to become a federal judge, you shoot for those tip top schools, and if you get in, you go. Consequently, those schools are, relative to Boalt and Columbia and Duke, chock full of the turbo-gunner superacademics gunning for clerkships and the appeals court judge path, as opposed to those who intend to go into private practice. We had those at Michigan, too, but not nearly so many, and most all of them wished they had gotten into Yale. The system feeds itself. The difficulty someone from the top of their undergrad class at Univ. of Whatever State may have getting a high-powered job over someone from the bottom quarter of the Harvard undergrad ranks bothers me a lot more than the dominance of Harvard and Yale grads on the Supreme Court roster.
Also, too, wasn’t O’Connor a Stanford grad?
Also, also, too, let’s not lose sight of the fact that a traditional Supreme Court Justice Academic Background is a nice thing to have politically attached to say, the first black Justice not named Thurgood Marshall, or the first Hispanic Justice, or the first couple female Justices. The bleatings and distractions that would attend a Jewish woman nominee would be ratcheted up to 11 and beyond if she had University of Texas Law School after her name. Not that presidents should let that affect their decisionmaking, but I’d bet they do.
Corner Stone
@Will:
This has also struck me as funny.
chopper
@Lihtox:
well, i understand what the ‘chicago school’ of economics is.
what’s the ‘harvard school’ point of view WRT the law and how does it differ from the ‘columbia school’ outlook?
i’ve never heard of any difference between the two.
gwangung
@Corner Stone: I think this is an oversimplification.
It’s a matter of concern. But it’s not a fatal concern for this nomination (and I wonder if it would be a fatal concern for any nomination).
Tazistan Jen
@NickM:
Yes, this is getting at what I mean when I say I’d like to see more diversity in the Federal courts and the Supremes in particular. It isn’t just about the Yale-and-Harvard hegemony, though that is indicative. It is also about life experience and family history. And yes, I certainly was saying and thinking this when Alito and Roberts were nominated.
I’d also like there to be some room for people who took a more circuitous path – late bloomers who are just as smart and talented but didn’t come into themselves soon enough to get straight A’s all through college.
None of this is an argument against confirming Kagan. I like her and think she will be a good justice. I am also quite confident that discussions like this won’t harm her chances for confirmation, so why not have them when the subject comes up?
Tazistan Jen
@MCA:
How about: (3) People who are just as smart and hard working and impressive as your (1) group, but didn’t go to Harvard or Yale? Surely you admit that there are some. Is that the degree from those schools is the only way you can identify brains and talent and achievement? Because otherwise, I don’t see where the fear of waves of mediocrity is coming from.
valdivia
Yeah closet conservative my ass. Kagan is as feminist and as liberal as we need her to be, she has been so her whole life. Fuck you Sully and BoBo.
Brien Jackson
@gwangung:
This. I don’t really have a problem with asking for some more educational diversity on the court, but:
a) I suspect it’s somewhat more complex than just “people don’t get selected unless they went to Harvard or Yale.”
b) I don’t really think it matters that much whether a nominee went to Harvard, Brown, or Stanford. No one is talking about looking for people who went to A&M, and I think most of this narrative is simply driven by somewhat resentful non-Ivy elites. Bobo and Ezra went to Chicago and UCLA, respectively.
MCA
@Tazistan Jen:
I had hoped my comments of “the fact that law schools that pump out lots of scholars that can compete in brain power with those from Harvard and Yale are habitually not represented on the Supreme Court” and “We can work on diversifying the shades of elite on the Supreme Court in the background, but let’s save it for when we’re not talking about an actual, live nominee” in my first post would have answered those questions preemptively.
And yes, I set up a false choice without providing the obvious middle ground, more to echo DougJ’s original question of “why the hell are we fixated on this now?” and to point out that it’s a lot better problem to have than the other extreme. Of course there are other ways to identify talent than looking at diplomas, and of course we should take them into account. On the other hand, those other measures all have flaws, too. Not to mention that we’re not just choosing any old Harvard law grads at the expense of the superachieving Wisconsin grad. We’re choosing the high post-graduation achievers from amongst the very top grads. And, I submit again, the talent disparity between the top of the class at Yale Law School and the top of the class at, say, UCLA Law School is greater than the same at the undergraduate level. Because by and large, the gal who finishes at the top of her undergrad class at Yale and smokes the LSAT stays at Yale for law school, but the guy who finishes top of his class at UCLA undergrad and also smokes the LSAT? Pretty good chance he also goes on to Yale for law school. One more level of skimming from the top.
Brien Jackson
@Tazistan Jen:
I think the pressure to pick young nominees probably exacerbtes the discrepancy. I suspect that if you just look at people age 45-52 whom could plausibly be nominated to the Court, you’d find that the vast majority of them went to Harvard or Yale.
eemom
@valdivia:
WORD.
superking
@taylormattd:
Yeah, solicitor general for a whole year! Wooo! A year! At a job she’s unqualified for! Wooo!
You did catch that little bit that she never argued a case of any kind before any court prior to being appointed Solicitor General, right? Who appoints someone with no courtroom experience whatsoever to be the nation’s representative in the Supreme Court?
Now she’s done the job for a year, wrote a terrible brief for Citizens United, which at least one member of the Court ripped apart, and some how she’s qualified to be on the Court?
This is a sad joke, and we’re the ones getting laughed at.
ruemara
You must have me confused with a moron. And I doubt most of your blog audience buys this shite as well.
superking
@Ron:
What does being dean of harvard law school mean to you? It doesn’t bear on judicial skill. It doesn’t necessarily indicate academic excellence (she came to the job from the Clinton Administration, not from within the ranks of scholars). Does it show she has an understanding of the Constitution or other contemporary issues before the Supreme Court? Does it show she has any expertise in any area of the law?
Look, there is no way to answer these questions by just pointing to the fact that she was Harvard Dean. It may have some bearing, but it needs explanation–an explanation that has yet to be produced. It’s not as if she were an MP in the army and is now applying to a local police force.
If you want to show me how being Dean of Harvard Law School makes you qualified to be on the Supreme Court, I’d love to hear it. But so far, it’s like arguing that the Chair of Harvard’s English Department should be Poet Laureate. It’s in the same field, but not necessarily on point.
valdivia
@eemom:
:)
that is all.
LD50
@sparky:
I agree. I’d be much happier if Obama ignored reality and nominated people who’d never get confirmed. At least that way we’d be pure.
Brien Jackson
@superking:
As opposed to what?
Hal
@sparky
Why would Warren be a significantly better pick? I find people just throwing names of other possible candidates out there insisting they would be perfect without any real evidence.
Warren is great and I love listening to her, but I don’t see why he experience makes her a “significantly” better candidate.
aimai
All this talk of diversity on the bench and “wishing people had taken some time off” or “done some other stuff” or “been non traditional” makes me break out in hives. The thing about being on the Supreme Court is that you have to have a real passion for the details of the law *if you are ever going to be able to write, or have written for you, an convincing opinion.* At this point in our history the question of what is constitutional or not is really grounded in centuries of law and interpretation. Lets say there was someone else up for the role who had a “non traditional” life–they’d taken fifteen years out to raise their kids, for example or they’d come into law after a full career as a geologist. And granted they were really really smart. They still wouldn’t be the best pick for this job because most of the job, at this moment, is writing such great opinions or dissents that they *can become law.* So half the job is going to be trying to persuade the other judges of your perspective–and they are largely biased towards both a conservative and a judicial/legalist perspective and the other half is writing an opinion or a dissent that works from a judicial/legalist perspective.
At this point this just isn’t a job for anyone who hasn’t dotted all their i’s and crossed all their Tee’s in a formal, legal ed, sort of way.
Here’s the other funny thing that I’m hearing in all this hair tearing and harrumphing about how Kagan is a “careerist” who “did the right things” and shouldn’t be “rewarded” but should be bypassed for a “risk taker” or some kind of imaginary free spirit who bucked the economy and her own interests to be a dreamy poet. Kagan is the same age I am and the same educational background. I can assure you that the risks *women* traditionally took with their educational career paths were to step out and raise their kids. This is the despised “half time” position which is full time work for half time pay, or “of counsel” which means no promotions but some place on the masthead. Kagan took some serious risks with her personal life to get ahead professionally. She dreamed, poetically, of being a top Dean at a top Law School, of being the first female Dean and then the first Female Solicitor General. Those are big dreams, and risky too–other women like Lani Guinier got shot down bigtime for dreaming such dreams.
It seems almost pathological to me how quickly we forget that women like Kagan struggled with a very much male dominated profession, which also dominated how our risks and our rewards were to be understood. Sparky (I think ) way upthread asserted with absolutely zero backing that *since 1980* its been a plus to be a woman in the legal field. What the fuck? I graduated from Harvard in 1982 and my female tutor who was then at Harvard Law had been in the first undergraduate class at Harvard where they integrated the dorms. It was still a very big deal to be a woman in law school. A huge deal to be a female in practice. And a very, very, very, big deal to show any fear or any personal issues like wanting to take time off–move off the fast track for any reason. You were letting the side down, you were used as an excuse not to hire other women, you were accused of being weak. That’s still true for “mommy trackers.”
aimai
Dave
I read the Somerby post and came away with quite a different take than DougJ (in fact, I didn’t see any criticism about her being an “elitist”, but rather that she is a cypher as far as her views are concerned and that was apparently done intentionally). But then my different reading doesn’t really surprise me since I read Somerby’s post with an open mind.
Brien Jackson
@aimai:
I get what you’re saying, but I think I would seperate that from the idea that diversity on the court is a good thing. Obviously most progressives would agree that a diverse set of judges on the court is something to strive for, and because of that I certainly don’t dismiss the idea that we shouldn’t just look to Harvard or Yale for nominees out of hand, I’m just not convinced there’s enough difference between Harvard and Brown or Stanford to really make it a meaningful distinction. I could be convinced of it though.
As an aside, rather than fretting over the fact that the top 2 law schools dominate the ranks of Supreme Court justices, it seems more worthwhile to focus on undergraduate education. I’d be much more sympathetic to the notion that we ought to seek out candidates who went to non-elite undergrad schools and worked themselves into an elite law shool than I am the notion that we ought to be concerned with the plight of people who did their undergrad work at UCLA before going to to Stanford Law.
Tim I
@superking:
Harvard rejected me, too. But I try not to bear grudges from 38 years ago.
LD50
Lisa will never join SCOTUS.
BottyGuy
I have no problem with elite Supreme court members, but maybe we can spread the elitism around. It seems to me that there are fine elitist legal minds available from Standford, Duke, University of Chicago, heck even Cornell.
I’ve found that engineering teams do much better if they come from diverse engineering shools and prior employment.
Corner Stone
@gwangung: I find it funny because it translates to many other topics since Obama won, and not really anything to do with how it may or may not effect her confirmation.
So of course it’s an oversimplification, but that’s because I see it across a broad spectrum.
Michael Scott
Is it possible for a Democratic judicial nominee to sail between the Scylla of “elitism” and the Charybdis of “empathy?”
Not that the Republicans would ever demand the impossible of their opponents, mind you.
superking
@Brien Jackson:
Huh? My point is that Dean of Harvard Law is at best an ambiguous qualification. I don’t understand what you mean by saying “as opposed to what?” Being the dean of any law school would be an ambiguous qualification.
Brien Jackson
@superking:
As opposed to what sort of qualification?
Bobby Thomson
@MCA:
Yale Law School has no class rank.
The_University_Of_I-da-ho
@ Michael Scott
Good point. This non-troversy is just another hypocritical, pseudo-populist brain fart from the neocons.
Trust me, “Supreme Court elitism” will join “big government” on the list of things that are complained about only during Democratic administrations. The only surprise is that anyone is surprised by this crap.
And Another Thing...
@kay: from your post:
…You know, I just love how I’m now not permitted to look at her resume. I think it has gaps. You disagree. That makes me outrageous and unfair and a joke…
I haven’t read anybody saying that to you. Because someone disagrees with your points you decide to distort comments and go waaaaaaa…. poor baby.
The discussion of career choices, including your comments, is a useful discussion, just stop with the “I’m being victimized cause you disagree schtick.”
Splitting Image
Just on the subject of too many Harvard and Yale grads on the court, I think the biggest reason for that is the political desire to pick people who are at the top of their profession but still young enough to stay on the court for thirty years.
That pretty much limits the field right there. If you expand the field to everyone in the legal profession who is at the top of their game, there are probably dozens of better candidates than Kagan. But if they’re in their 60s or 70s and took a few years off back in the day to broaden their horizons, then they missed their shot.
We can all lament the existence of a “Harvard effect” which allows graduates to rise faster if they can claim a connection to the Harvard brand, but you can’t fault people whose main goal is to rise fast (and it has to be to be a Supreme Court candidate by the time they’re 50) for making a beeline to that school or to Yale.
Diane Wood, for example, will be 60 this year. Bill Clinton tried to ignore this and picked Ginsburg when she was 60. The result is that she will be replaced much earlier than Clarence Thomas.
Lisa
@Bobby Thomson: Just check out who makes partner at any of the big law firms. You will get tangled up in the ivy pretty quickly wading into that list.
Lisa
I agree that this ivy league hate is specious and really stupid, with regard to Kagan. If you have issues with the ivy’s, then stop sending your 3 year old to Swahili classes and calculus camp in hopes of giving her a competitive edge into one of the ivys in 15 years. If you stop twisting yourselves into pretzels to get your kids into them, maybe that might put a bit of a damper on their influence.
kay
@Corner Stone:
Well, someone better tell the President and First Lady that this is “unrealistic” because they tell groups of young people again and again that they should serve in some capacity, early in their careers.
And they aren’t talking to people with “legacy money”. They tell them to do it anyway.
Maybe they meant “except the best and brightest, who are far too important to waste a year or two or three on working in a low-level job”.
I feel pretty confident that people can actually do that, if they’re motivated and interested, because the President and First Lady tell me it’s 1. true and 2. desirable.
You know, these graduation speeches about “service” and giving back” start to ring a little hollow when the people at top levels apparently feel it’s required of others, and not all that valuable, in the scheme of things.
kay
@Corner Stone:
Further, Justice Ginsburg didn’t think it was a waste of time, or “unrealistic”, when she served as a volunteer lawyer for the ACLU.
She stepped off the old track. Didn’t hurt her any. She found her life’s issue there.
So don’t tell me it can’t be done.
Brien Jackson
@kay:
But it did make her 60 years old when she was nominated, meaning she’s going to be outlasted by Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas on the court.
Criticisms like yours are great so far as they go, but they strike me as being contingent on changing the court’s structure. So long as justice’s have life terms, we’re pretty much stuck with what we have.
matoko_chan
umm….no.
it is just part of Game Theory like the Iterated Prisoners Dilemma and tit-for-tat and bidding theory and EGT and zero-sum games and Minmax theorem and evo theory of cooperation.
but that is ok.
if this blog is largely bio-luddites i guess you can be math-luddites too.
kay
@Brien Jackson:
Her situation was different. She’s of a different generation than Kagan. The jobs Kagan had were probably not really open to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, coming up.
Look, I’m fairly practical, and I accept your counting heads analysis. But am I a little disappointed that the SCOTUS didn’t dare take a position that was less than incredibly prestigious at any point in her career?
Yeah, I am.
We can’t keep telling young people that this trenches-work is valuable and worth a sacrifice and then not do it. Obama and Michelle pitch this at every college graduation. They feel strongly about it. Are we saying that we’re exempting the top 10 %, because, really, we have plans for them, and it’s important they do Big Work every year past high school, or they’ll fall off some imaginary track?
I don’t think we are. So I’m accepting what I consider a hole in Kagan’s resume, and I back the nomination. But I’m not kidding myself that it was impossible for her to what Ginsburg did. It wasn’t.
gwangung
@matoko_chan:
Very rich, coming from you.
You’re an ignorant twit whose proud of their own ignorance, and starting to REALLY piss me off.
Anne Laurie
@valdivia:
I guess BoBo Brooks doesn’t want Kagan stroking his thigh under the table all through the dinner party.
Tuff shite, BoBo. Obama goes with the careerists he has, not the careerists you like.
superking
@Brien Jackson:
Ahh, in my view, the best qualifications in no particular order are:
a. judicial experience (Sotomayor)
b. significant litigation and/or appellate practice (Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Ginsburg)
c. Academic experience (This is a cheap qualification in my view since legal academics are held to literally no standard whatsoever and never suffer consequences for their stupidity)
d. Political experience in the mode of Earl Warren
Kagan was a professor for a few years and didn’t produce much work. She was never involved in any litigation whatsoever, let alone significant public interest litigation. She worked in the Clinton White House, but has never been an elected politician. And she’s never served as a judge.
I just don’t find much in her record to recommend her as a Supreme Court justice.
Corner Stone
@kay:
Then why mention Ginsburg? You flip a couple times in the last posts between saying Ginsburg is instructive, and then she’s different and from a different generation. It’s like when Mike Kay keeps bringing up William O. Douglas as somehow relevant to Kagan now.
And, as usual, you are missing the point.
Boggled, I am.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@superking: You do realize she is only 50 years old, don’t you. There is a law of reciprocal virtues for an ideal SC justice that are in conflict. Or, to get a justice to serve the longest and continue a presnits legacy, you need to pick the youngest versus time for experience which would mostly mean older and a quicker visit from the grim reaper. And it pisses me off for folks to so blithely dismiss her stint as Dean at HLS. And while the quantity of her academic writings is not great, a number of experts have lauded it’s high quality.
You are nitpicking around the edges because you wanted a hard left ideologue that had such a paper trail to prove. That is okay, as at this particular point in time, so did I. But the lack of that paper trail and relative youth, without time for more experience in the work world, does not preclude Ms. Kagan from turning out to be that liberal lioness you pine for. Just don’t go around belittling the experience this woman does have because you don’t feel as comfortable as you would like.
When you run for and make POTUS, then you can pick a SC nominee that makes you feel more assured. Till then you will just have to suffer like the rest of us, and more so if you and others like you continues to pour cold water on this nominee when it is isn’t deserved. Some of us will warm that water back up and pour back.
kay
@Corner Stone:
Your whole approach with me is dismissive and patronizing. I don’t agree that you’re world’s smarter and more sophisticated than me. I think most of your “devastating rebuttals” rely on swaggering bully-boy nonsense, as here, where it’s content-free.
I happen to not agree that you’re better at evaluating relevant experience re: judges than I am, despite your absolute confidence that you are, and none of your glib and snotty dismissals have been on-point to anything I’ve actually written.
I think what people actually do matters, I think it should probably match somewhat with what they tell others to do, and I’ll look at Kagan’s resume in any matter I please. You can believe that’s foolish, but I don’t give a rat’s ass.
kay
@Corner Stone:
Just another starry-eyed hippy, making all kinds of zany career choices. WTF was wrong with her? Was she not told this is unrealistic and impossible for anyone who doesn’t have a private income?
kay
@Corner Stone:
Another DFH wasting his time at public work. Clearly it ruined his future career, and was a complete waste of time.
MCA
@Bobby Thomson:
So what? They still grade students, and list those grades on transcripts. And, despite the system not being of the “A through F” variety, it is hierarchical. It’s not like there’s no identifiable “top” of the class. I can see on a Yale transcript pretty easily if the applicant is a superstar or not.
But feel free to just substitute “Harvard” if you must – despite not reporting their class ranks, they also put grades on transcripts and still give cum laude distinctions just like everyone else.
Do you disagree with the point generally or are you picking nits?
kay
@Corner Stone:
Another one!
“She worked as an assistant district attorney in New York for five years before entering private practice in 1984. She played an active role on the boards of directors for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the State of New York Mortgage Agency, and the New York City Campaign Finance Board.”
They’re not taking career advice from Cornerstone, Obama and Sotomayor! They can’t do this stuff.
It’s crazy and too much like a television program, and they’ll never get anywhere in life! Losers.
eemom
@kay:
Corner Stone, to quote Jane Austen, “does not deserve the compliment of rational opposition.”
In my own less lofty parlance, he’s a nasty little name calling creep.
kay
@eemom:
Okay. I get mad and have to be stopped, so thanks for that.
I’ll turn up every judge in the history of the world who did a public interest/low-level 5 years, left to my own devices.
I hadn’t even really scratched the surface on Presidents, let alone judges. Hillary Clinton! Kidding, just kidding.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@kay: There is no house limit on flaming our Corner Stone. He is the blog straw man built of Tequila soaked cow chips. Just bring plenty of hot dogs and marshmellows./ He himself usually furnishes the match.
Honus
@superking: “Academic experience (This is a cheap qualification in my view since legal academics are held to literally no standard whatsoever and never suffer consequences for their stupidity)”
c.f. Antonin Scalia
kay
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
They’ve managed to turn public service work and/or a street level lawyer job into some lame “bridge year” that only over-indulged college students with trust funds can indulge in.
Not true, Stuck. Lots and lots of ambitious Lefty lawyers do it, including the Prez.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@kay:
The Founders purposely left wide open qualifications for being a justice on the supreme court. So, I agree that street level legal work is a noble qualification for a SC Justice. Just as being Dean of one of our most prestigious law schools is. They gave the duty of selection and standards for a nominee to the President alone as plenary power. I suspect so it wouldn’t be institutionalized as being only this or that part of society. With the Congress to sign off on to consent. In this day and age though, I think I would like a SC Justice to at least be a lawyer, after that it’s the presnits call and congress’s to agree, or not. I think it was a good idea to appoint at least one justice outside the cloistered world of federal appeals courts that have by default, become something of an institutionalized standard, maybe to make peeps feel all warm and fuzzy that the pick will or won’t do what they want. The fact that she learned and worked at a top law school in and of itself should be no detriment, unless it can be demonstrated Ms. Kagan will cater to the rich upper crust, or any one section of society. I see no evidence of that in her works or personality, as yet, whereby both Roberts and Alito wreak of privilege and societal elitism and isolation from common folks. But we shall see as this thing moves on.
Batocchio
Why not Anita Hill?
kay
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
That’s all fine, Stuck. I appreciate the honesty. And thanks for “one of our country’s best law schools”. For a while there I was under the impression that Kagan’s work as Dean of Harvard Law School was a gone-begging volunteer gig she picked up because no one else would take it.
matoko_chan
@gwangung: adhom adhom adhom.
like i havent heard that before……..liberal bio-luddite.
;)
gwangung
@matoko_chan:
You’ll hear it again and again, oh ignorant one. Just like creationists and anti-vaxers do.
By the way. You’re not a biologist, are you? Because I’ve done research in psychometric methodology techniques. You know, the kind they use in achievement tests and IQ tests? You can’t make the link between biological processes and the methodology because you don’t know the territory.
(Yeah, yeah, I know…”La La La I can’t hear you.”)
matoko_chan
@gwangung: oooo
do tell.
a psychometrician.
then….do you agree with BJers that IQ and race are just fantasy constructs developed by a secret global cabal of the KKK, Stormfront, Dr. James Watson, the cryogenically preserved head of Adolf Hilter, Charles Murray and Steve Sailer?
Corner Stone
@kay:
Well, this is interesting. You’re not very bright, you obstinately pursue unrealistic outcomes, and you shift arguments from post to post.
But somehow a rebuttal of you becomes some bully boy posts.
I admit freely that I consider you to be not very bright, and not really worth going back and forth with. That’s why I responded to a post by aimai, and not directly to you.
You can’t make a cogent argument from one post to the next.
Does Ginsburg matter or not? Is she relevant to Kagan or not?
No, she’s not. But you somehow can’t make up your mind. One post she’s essential, and the next she’s from a different generation and not so much.
All this said, and I could go on, – no one with any common sense will ever choose to do what you somehow think makes sense.
People who parachute in to a tough as nails situation do not do so “for a year or two” to smell the tarmac, or where the rubber meets the road.
You’re just being silly with this, and it’s pretty clear that is so.
Corner Stone
@Corner Stone: And BTW – you deserve to be patronized and dismissed.
You’re a clown who’s made multiple threads worth of demands that just don’t jibe with reality.
I objected when people called you crazy epithets – and I stand by that. You don’t deserve to have your opinions lead you to some monkey circle hooting.
But you do deserve to be called for the complete disconnect from reality they embody.
Corner Stone
@kay: I’m sorry to tell you this – but that was 50 years ago.
About the time Kagan was born IIRC. Life has changed a little since then. Or do you disagree? Life experience is timeless?
Corner Stone
@kay:
When are you going to pull together the mental faculties to understand the point?
A significant portion of individuals can just never do this.
IT’S NOT ABOUT “WANT TO”. Or motivation or desire or choice – in a lot of cases there is no choice to be made.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Corner Stone
@eemom: How you tie your shoes in the morning is beyond me.
You lie, slander and just outright misrepresent pretty much everything people say that you disagree with.
You’re scum of the lowest order and should be hounded from public discourse.
Just unrelentingly stupid scum.
kay
@Corner Stone:
Cede the point. Christ. You’re a sore loser too, in addition to pontificating generally and not accurately outside your area of experience?
You’re wrong. Most of the liberals on the Court did a public service or actual lawyering stint. Deliberately. And went on to Big Things. Despite your snarky dismissal as a “bridge year”.
Is it remotely possible that you don’t know what you’re talking about?
Corner Stone
@kay:
And it won’t matter! It won’t ever fucking matter one teensy tiny bit! It is IRRELEVANT to the point myself and others have made here!
It is absolutely off the track of relevancy.
Please, for FSM sake, get a grip that that data point is not even in the ballpark of the things people are saying when they disagree with your ridiculous thoughts.
kay
@Corner Stone:
Sotomayor, Corner Stone.
You’re wrong. Assistant DA is below her level. She took it because she wanted trial experience. It doesn’t pay much either, and she didn’t have a private income. 5 years, rather than your silly “bridge year” nonsense.
For her career. As a judge. Because she thought it was important, and, of course, was perfectly free to do it.
kay
@Corner Stone:
What a baby. It’s the internet. No big deal if you’re wrong.
“I get people like you when the step off the elevator” That was your last foray into bully-boy talk.
You Master of the Universe, you.
Corner Stone
@kay: I’m not “snarkily” dismissing some stupid GD idea of a “bridge year”.
I’m telling you that it is unrealistic! People in a large section of life simply could never, ever do this.
You’ve sunk your teeth into something that makes no sense.
It makes no sense. Is it possible you don’t know what you’re suggesting?
Corner Stone
@kay: You quote things about Ginsburg to prove something about Sotomayor?
Pathetic.
Corner Stone
@kay: That has nothing to do with being a bully. How is that tough talk threatening?
You’re just a clown.
Corner Stone
@Corner Stone: Somehow, I do not believe that being an ADA in NYC is equivalent to doing tenant’s right’s.
But that may be just me.
Corner Stone
@kay: God. I hate it that you’ve pushed me to agree with something TZ has said.
You are just out of orbit. Goodness gracious.
kay
@Corner Stone:
Try to follow along, and stop being so pedantic and silly. Every single liberal on the Court did a stint in either public interest or actual practice.
An assistant prosecutor is a horrible job. It’s not prestigious and it doesn’t pay well and they work like dogs. The one and only reason Sonia Sotomayor did it is because she’d be thrown right into trial, and she’d be in court, every day. That’s why people with prestigious degrees take those jobs. Because they want to learn something, after law school. They want a specific skill, or a specific experience, and she wasn’t going to get trial experience at a big firm, right out of the box. It’s not some bullshit “year of real world”, and it’s not reserved for those with a trust fund. Obama wanted trial experience, at oral argument, in civil rights. He deliberately and carefully pursued that experience, and declined other offers. He didn’t get it, because he was a strong writer, so they used him in research and writing, but that’s why he did it.
Here’s Brennen:
Brennan attended Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.He graduated in 1931 and entered private practice in his home state of New Jersey, where he practiced labor law at the firm of Pitney Hardin (which would later become Day Pitney).
kay
@Corner Stone:
I don’t even really care that Kagan didn’t do any of these things.
What I don’t understand is why it’s impossible to admit that she didn’t do these things, she chose not to, plenty of other people do them, mostly liberals, granted, but there it is, and they have merit, although she didn’t do them.
Corner Stone
@kay:
Speaking of pedantry…what you don’t seem to get is that you are the only person making this argument. Again and again and again and again.
And no one else is buying it. They aren’t saying those things don’t have merit. They aren’t saying it would be a negative if Kagan had decided something different.
Myself – I am saying I personally could not have done it. And I get that a significant portion of other ambitious people could not have done it either.
Your suggestion/question/position or whatever doesn’t pass anyone’s smell test. It’s beyond the pale. No one besides your pedantic self thinks it’s even in the realm.
But discuss it all you want. You’ll get a lot of traction with that argument, as has been proven here.
And all of your examples are from an era that was 50+ years ago. Doesn’t this seem significant to you?
And Sotomayor? I bless her for whatever choices she made in her career. I maintain her 5 years in the ADA have zero relevance to the argument you are trying to sell here.
Do you know why she took that job? And I mean “know” why she did that? Not imprint your ideals onto her.
kay
@Corner Stone:
That’s not even true. A lot of the practitioners agreed with me. They were focusing on the Harvard-Yale lock, but I don’t care about that. I look at after law school.
I also think it’s amusing that Tim Geithner was savaged for his supposed mentee relationship with Larry Summers (I think Geithner brushed up against Summers in an elevator or something, was the allegation) although Tim Geithner has done an actual good job with a horrible situation, while Kagan, who was recruited and hired by Summers, is defended fiercely as the best thing since Brennen.
Larry Summers cooties must have worn off.
Anyway. I back her, because a McCain nominee would have been far worse. I’m not thrilled with her resume though.
Triassic Sands
The problem doesn’t seem to have been “enough,” but rather any. Out of something like 32 hires, Kagan hired 31 whites and one Asian-American. No African-Americans. Zero Hispanics. And obviously no Native Americans.
And only seven women.
That’s a record most Republicans would envy.
I can’t imagine what Kagan’s explanation for those numbers would be. In fact, I can’t imagine that there is a legitimate explanation. Given the talent pool that Kagan had to draw from, it’s hard to believe that while she was hiring all those white men, she didn’t pass over some of the finest female legal minds in the country.
Maybe this is proof that Kagan is heterosexual. She was actually hiring potential mates and since she isn’t a lesbian, every position she filled with a women was one fewer man she’d have to choose from. I guess — since she’s still single — her plan didn’t work out.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@kay:
The grotesque absurdity of this argument is exactly why I think you are full of crap …. just a weird and annoying troll.
Kagan either is, or is not, capable of doing the job she’s appointed to. Not a word you’ve said speaks to that question at all. It’s all about this stupid obsession you have with the way other people conduct their lives, first, and your apparent conviction that this obsession is of any particular interest to anyone else in the world.
Between the obsession and the conviction, the latter is the thing that makes your argument insufferable and bizarre. If you really mean this nonsense, which I doubt, then it looks to me like blathering about somebody else’s life choices is really a cover for you to avoid facing the miserable choices you have made in your own life. How long before the GBCW meltdown?
Are you standing on a ledge? Ordinarily I’d say “Don’t jump” but in this case …….
Derek
@matoko_chan:
FYI Steve Sailer is a drooling moron; I hope you aren’t suggesting otherwise.