Demonizing the "Roberts Court," dishonestly, Part One

Powerline ^ | 5 July, '10 | Paul Mirengoff

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Judicial confirmation hearings are supposed to be about the fitness of the nominee to serve. Last week, however, the Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee used the hearings over Elena Kagan's nomination to attack the "Roberts Court."

This attempt took several forms, one of which was to call as a witness Lilly Ledbetter, the unsuccessful party in a 2007 Supreme Court case where the issue concerned calculating the time period for filing a charge of pay discrimination with the EEOC. The Ledbetter decision no longer states the law on the subject; Congress amended the statute in question. Nor, it need hardly be said, does Ledbetter know anything about Kagan's fitness to serve on the Supreme Court. Ledbetter seems to have been called as a witness solely for the purpose of criticizing a three-year old decision of the Roberts Court that no longer controls the issue it decided, in the hope of painting that Court as "activist."

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This attempt took several forms, one of which was to call as a witness Lilly Ledbetter, the unsuccessful party in a 2007 Supreme Court case where the issue concerned calculating the time period for filing a charge of pay discrimination with the EEOC. The Ledbetter decision no longer states the law on the subject; Congress amended the statute in question. Nor, it need hardly be said, does Ledbetter know anything about Kagan's fitness to serve on the Supreme Court.