Sunday opinion.
Martha Minow:
Now that the Senate has confirmed Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, there will be post-mortems about the confirmation process. Many members of the Judiciary Committee criticized Kagan for her admiration of Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she clerked. I also clerked for Marshall, and found that these criticisms revealed not only a lack of knowledge of Marshall’s precise adherence to rules and precedent but also a failure to appreciate the significance of his contributions to American law. Kagan’s confirmation is not only a victory for her, but also a confirmation of Marshall’s enduring legacy.
From the Globe: Martha Minow, who is Elena Kagan’s successor as dean of Harvard Law School, is author of “In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Constitutional Landmark."
NY Times editorial:
Political forecasters have warned for months that the widespread anti-Democratic sentiment in the nation could well coalesce into a Republican wave that approaches that party’s gains in 1994. President Obama’s independents have deserted him, the business and Tea Party wings of the Republican Party are alight with fervor and cash, and even season-ticket Democrats are searching for their old enthusiasm.
In part, that is because the significant accomplishments of the last two years — health care reform, the stimulus package, the resuscitation of the auto industry, financial reform — were savagely attacked by the right and aggressively misrepresented as the hoof beats of totalitarianism. Most of those efforts were actually highly diluted to draw centrist support, but they did not really get much of it, and the compromises meant that the bills were defended only halfheartedly by Democrats who should have stood up more firmly to the rage.
Put most broadly, the Democrats have been failing to delineate the differences between themselves and Republicans, to remind voters what Republicans would do if returned to power and how little their policies have changed from those during the two terms of President George W. Bush.
Frank Rich:
Could George W. Bush be a kind of Gipper-in-reverse and win yet one more for the Democrats? Clearly this White House sees him as the gift that will keep on giving. The 2010 campaign against the Bush administration is in full cry, with President Obama leading the charge. The Republicans are “betting on amnesia,” he confidently told the claque at a recent fund-raiser. “They don’t have a single idea that’s different from George Bush’s ideas.” It’s now the incessant party line.
Betting on amnesia is almost always a winning, not a losing, wager in America. Angry demonstrators at health care town-hall meetings didn’t remember that Medicare is a government program, and fewer and fewer voters of both parties recall that the widely loathed TARP was a Bush administration creation supported by the G.O.P. Congressional leadership.
George Packer:
“This is just one of those days when you want to throw up your hands and say, ‘What in the world are we doing?’ ” Senator Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat, said.
“It’s unconscionable,” Carl Levin, the senior Democratic senator from Michigan, said. “The obstructionism has become mindless.”
The Senators were in the Capitol, sunk into armchairs before the marble fireplace in the press lounge, which is directly behind the Senate chamber. It was four-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon. McCaskill, in a matching maroon jacket and top, looked exasperated; Levin glowered over his spectacles.
“Also, it’s a dumb rule in itself,” McCaskill said. “It’s time we started looking at some of these rules.”
Listen up, Chris Dodd.
WaPo:
At another time, the ruling overturning California's ban on same sex marriages might have landed with the force of a political earthquake. Instead, the relatively restrained response underscores both the singular economic focus of this year's elections and the shifting politics of one of the country's major social issues.
More beltway CW down the toilet. Nate has an idea why:
Peter King, an idiosyncratic and bellicose Republican Congressmen from Long Island, has been one of the few politicians in either party willing to speak on the record about gay marriage in the wake of Judge Vaughn Walker's ruling on Proposition 8 this Wednesday. As he revealed in an interview with Politico, King thinks his party no longer has any need to use gay rights as a wedge issue -- not when they have immigrants to pick on instead:
King, the Long Island congressman, said that in terms of social issues, the raging controversy over the Arizona border laws is providing more than enough ammunition for Republicans in key districts.
“The Arizona immigration law is there, there’s no reason to be raising an issue of gay rights” as a wedge, he said.
Congratulations, gays! You're no longer the dweebiest kid on the playground.
NY Times:
In giddier times before the bust, his predecessor presided over the auction in a jaunty red blazer, but Mr. Oynes was far too conservative for that. Or so everyone thought — until he opened his briefcase and brought down the house with a size 46 scarlet jacket, an omen of the coming deep-water boom.
“They knew symbolically what this meant,” Mr. Oynes said in a recent interview. “In Louisiana terms: ‘Let the good times roll.’ ”
Now the gulf is reeling from the worst oil spill in United States history. Deep-water drilling has been temporarily banned. And the Minerals Management Service, the agency that led the way into the deep-water age, has been abolished, ridiculed as a pawn of the oil industry it was meant to oversee. The gulf office that Mr. Oynes ran for many years has drawn particular scorn.
AP:
Americans acquired a whole new lexicon — "top hats" and "top kills," "containment domes" and "junk shots" — as they watched on fuzzy screens while an ever-growing school of remote-controlled submarines attempted to staunch the well, and came to the realization that the oil industry was not prepared to deal with a blowout a mile beneath the sea. "It's like if NASA had pushed the technology envelope as far as they could to get into space, and then didn't do any kind of funding or study on how to get back," says Roberts.