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Posts: 4303
06/30/10 6:34 AM
Moderator/Assoc. Editor
RickLowe wrote:She has no experience.PERIOD.
You will not merely be calling balls and strikes. If that was the case then Supreme Court nominations and our hearings would not be the high stakes events they are today. But all of these things do matter and we care deeply about the Supreme Court precisely because it rules on only the toughest and most challenging problems. We can all agree that your decisions will impact society long after you have left the court. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it plainly, “Presidents come and go, but the Supreme Court goes on forever.” That is why it is so important for us to know who you are, Solicitor General Kagan – what is in your heart and what is in your mind. We can gain some insight from your work for President Clinton and Justice Thurgood Marshall. But we have less evidence about what sort of judge you will be than on any nominee in recent memory. Your judicial philosophy is almost invisible to us. We don’t have a right to know in advance how you will decide cases, but we do have a right to understand your judicial philosophy and what you think about fundamental issues that will come before the court. As you said in your own critique of these hearings in 1995, it is an “embarrassment” that Senators do not insist that a nominee reveal what kind of Justice she would make, by disclosing her views on important legal issues.