Elena Kagan last week became the fourth woman ever to take a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, after winning Senate confirmation on a 63–37 vote largely along party lines. All but five Republicans opposed Kagan as unfit for the court, arguing that she was a liberal ideologue who lacked any judicial experience. The first female dean of Harvard Law School, the 50-year-old New Yorker most recently served as U.S. solicitor general.
Kagan, who replaces liberal justice John Paul Stevens, is not expected to alter the court’s ideological mix of five conservatives and four liberals. But for the first time in history, the Supreme Court includes no Protestants; it now consists of six Catholics and three Jews, including Kagan.
With Kagan joining Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, fully one-third of the high court is female, said the Louisville Courier-Journal in an editorial. This is “pretty remarkable—considering that the nation went for more than 200 years without a woman even being nominated.” No one expects these highly accomplished women “to fall into a gender slipstream,” but their experience as women will undoubtedly inform their opinions, and that’s “a good thing.”
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Diversity is fine; it’s partisanship that’s killing us, said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post. “As recently as 2005, Chief Justice John Roberts was confirmed 78 to 22, with the support of 22 Democrats.” Justice Stephen Breyer received 87 yes votes. Yet Kagan received support from only five Republicans. “The deterioration has been both sudden and precipitous,” with the judicial selection process descending into one more “partisan political fight.” It’s time for both parties to stop the madness.
Dream on, said James Taranto in The Wall Street Journal Online. With the Supreme Court precariously balanced between right and left, Republicans and Democrats alike risk political suicide if they don’t fight to the death on nominees. As long as the country itself remains polarized, senators will be pressured to “vote against confirming the other party’s nominees.”
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