GOP: It's not even coded bigotry anymore (Joan Walsh)

[jefferson_dem]

It's not even coded bigotry anymore

The GOP hits Elena Kagan for admiring Thurgood Marshall and hailing from "Manhattan's Upper West Side"
By Joan Walsh

I'm not entirely sold on Solicitor General Elena Kagan as our newest Supreme Court Justice. Ironically, one of my reservations has to do with her approach to leveling racial discrimination – specifically her reported role in scuttling a Clinton administration plan to do away with sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine (which has meant heavier punishment for African Americans than whites for dealing or using the same drug.)

That said, Republicans on the Senate Judicial Committee are trying to make the case she's outside the mainstream of American jurisprudence, by attacking her clerking for (and admiring) legal giant Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court justice, while singling her out as a denizen of "Manhattan's Upper West Side" – you know, the neighborhood known for Zabar's and bagels and, well, Jews.

Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions of Alabama, who wasn't crazy about Sonia Sotomayor, you'll recall, denounced Kagan having "associated herself with well-known activist judges who have used their power to redefine the meaning of our constitution and have the result of advancing that judge's preferred social policies," and he cited Marshall, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund leader who argued Brown vs. Board of Education. According to Talking Points Memo, Republicans mentioned Marshall an astonishing 35 times in the hearing (compared with 14 mentions of President Obama) with his son, Thurgood Marshall Jr., sitting in the audience.

Sen. Jon Kyl played the culture war card:

“Not only is Ms. Kagan’s background unusual for a Supreme Court nominee, it is not clear how it demonstrates that she has, in the President’s words, ‘a keen understanding of how the law affects the daily lives of the American people.’ One recent article noted that ‘ Kagan’s experience draws from a world whose signposts are distant from most Americans: Manhattan’s upper West side, Princeton University, Harvard Law School and the upper reaches of the Democratic legal establishment.’"

Unfortunately, it was Politico's otherwise smart New Yorker Ben Smith who supplied Kyl with that silly soundbite. But Fox News's awesome duo of Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier foreshadowed the GOP's strategy early Monday morning. Here's how Kelly said she knew Kagan was a liberal:

"Living in New York City, I can speak to this. She grew up on the upper west side of Manhattan. We walked around the upper west side of Manhattan not too long ago. And I asked my husband aloud, ‘Do you think it’s true what they say, that this is… the liberal center of New York City, of one of the most liberal cities, this is the center of it. And at that moment… a woman walked by us with a tee shirt that read, ‘Kill Cheney First.’ So, yes. So I’m gonna say, ‘Yes.’ It is a liberal area and it is the area from which Elena Kagan hails.”

Baier concurred: “So there you have it.”

<SNIP>

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh/politics/2010/06/28/not_even_coded_bigotry_anymore

[Bitwit1234]

1. So Kagan's a liberal and shouldn't be a Supreme

BUT Alitio, Roberts, Thomas and Scalia are definitely CONservatives and they should be judges. So I suppose when the Constitution was written it had the hidden message that only republicans, could be judges, representatives, senators and mostly presidents. Damn those founding fathers. I love the way the present day republicans knew what they were thinking.

[bluestateguy]

2. Ugh

Uh, yes, she is of an elite background, and people of elite backgrounds do tend to live in places like the Upper West Side.

This is a Supreme Court judgeship here.What do they want? Joe the Plumber, or some uneducated simp, just so we can say that the new judge is "just like one of us"?

[starroute]

10. The Upper West Side was not an 'elite' nighborhood then

I lived on the Upper West Side as a kid. We had a rent-controlled apartment for which we paid $83 a month -- $92 after they put a new stove in. (These days it would run you a couple of thousand.) We moved out in 1961 (when Kagan was a baby) after the papers started running stories about the neighborhood with titles like "Mayor Wagner Tours Slum Area."

It was very liberal and very Jewish -- and the bagels were great. But it was most definitely not elite.

[hlthe2b]

3. I suppose it would be inappropriate to say....

I want one of those t-shirts...! :evilgrin: So there you have it, indeed....

[Pirate Smile]

4. My favorite part of the hearing was Republicans reading Marshall quotes or

compliments she paid to him - and then treating it as damning evidence against her because it showed she would be for the little guy against the powerful, that the Judicial Branch should stand up for people when the other two branches have not. The more I heard, the better I liked her.

The bizarre thing is that this Roberts Court has so completely flipped everything - who is now the poor, pitiful group needing to be defended by the US Supreme Court because the other two branches turned on them, writing regulations the Robert's Court views as oppressive - Answer = Corporations. There are more examples. We have an extreme activist conservative, corporatist Supreme Court now willing to overturn any precedent. It has been breathtaking.

edit to add - I called my Mom early in the Hearing to let her know that the big Republican talking point against her was - OMG she worked for, liked and respected Thurgood Marshall? Oh, noooooo... the horror.

I believe I did point out the overpowering reaction I had to hearing all of these attacks coming from all them "good ole' white boys in their big ole' southern drawls" - it just really stuck out to me along with the continuing mentions of where exactly Kagan was from originally. Mom's response - well, after Black people, NY Jews would probably be the next group they have historically hated the most. Flashed Mississippi Burning through my mind.

[rufus dog]

6. Kyl was amazing in his unbridled hate

What a friggen asshole, he talked for a couple of minutes of Marshall and her promoting fairness for the little guy, I was waiting for the but....but there wasn't one. His point was she wasn't for the big corporations so she was unqualified.

[butterfly77]

5. It took her and a lot of the so called...

mainstream to realize this,most people in this country already knew this during the campaign some finally realized it sometime last year...no surprise.

[KingFlorez]

7. It's very clear now

The notion that Thurgood Marshall was an activist is nothing but nonsense, his position on civil rights lined up with the constitution. There was nothing activist about that.

[struggle4progress]

8. The GOP base contains lots of neo-confederates still angry about desegregation

They're hateful wackos, but scumbags like Kyl don't mind playing to the hateful wackos in the peanut gallery

[besdayz]

9. a

as much as these blowhards have made reverse racism and having the white man being destroyed by minority policies their agenda, its ironic and just daft of them to come out with this blatant, not even undisguised, bigotry....

i have to think, like a child who was chastised for jumping in the swimming pool, they just keep wanting to jump in more---preferably one with no black kids. they play to the lowest common denominator of their base and no wonder the stooges/wingnuts/freakshow/ have taken over that party-- their idiocy is given voice daily by senators and congressmen....

their strategy is essential to incite hatred, fear, racial and cultural superiority on the middle class and underprivileged. yet somehow they manage to convince many of these middle class people to be the subject of their own hatred. its priceless. its the american dream. the ones who buy into this hatred of "other" and "poor" all rationalize it by saying they themselves can't possibly be this drain on america, that they are somehow above those saps, all the while collecting a social security, medicare, and unemployment check and getting charged for overdue books in the public library and enjoying simple pleasures like drinking water sans cancer. but that guy calling for an end to war and better health care--he's a commie bastard.

i sometimes think this is all a product of the relative youth of this country--200 yrs. that europe went through this many centuries ago, and then they had their enlightenment. would be nice to tivo all this shit and fast forward to ours.....