Kagan v. Marshall

摘要

When Senate Re-publicans decided to turn the first day of Solicitor General Elena Kagan's confirmation hearing into a referendum on her mentor, Justice Thurgood Mar-shall, they made two mistakes. The first was tactical: most Americans don't care much about Marshall's jurisprudential style. They think of him as a lion of the civil-rights movement, and deriding him as a "judicial activist" and "results oriented" served only to insult them. But the real mistake the GOP made in relentlessly tethering Kagan to Marshall was that the comparison illustrated the exact point Senate Democrats were attempting to make all week: that the court has a critical function to play when the other two branches of government let the people down.