Litigation

Republican McConnell Urged ?Rise Above Partisanship?

By Peter Hardin

Shortly after Solicitor General Elena Kagan was nominated to the Supreme Court, observers highlighted a book review article she wrote years earlier depicting the confirmation process as a “vapid and hollow charade.”

It turns out Kagan, who recently won confirmation to the high court, wasn’t the only player who had penned an old article that could be useful in examining the process today.

Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky wrote a law review article in 1971, according to a Washington Post commentary by Ruth Marcus, in which McConnell described how a true statesman should respond to a president’s Supreme Court nomination:

“It will always be difficult to obtain a fair and impartial judgment from such an inevitably political body as the United States Senate. However . . . the true measure of a statesman may well be the ability to rise above partisan political considerations to objectively pass upon another aspiring human being.”

Times have clearly changed for the worse, Marcus writes, labeling the current process a blatantly partisan political fight. “What concerns me is the corroded state of the confirmation process and the prospect of worse to come,” she says, wondering whether the next step may be an all-out filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee.

Marcus doesn’t advocate what she calls the “McConnell standard,” but she blasts the current process “of near automatic opposition to the other party’s nominee” as out of line in the other direction.

As for McConnell, he says “the process has become more political,” but he blames the party across the aisle and adds that “it’s very hard for me to make the argument to my members, this new standard having been established, you should ignore it.”

Full post as published by The Gavel on August 11, 2010 (boomark / email).