Welcome to your Monday open thread. It’s a hot Monday after a hot weekend. Remember when everyone was bitching about the snow and cold? I miss those days.
The SCOTUS confirmation hearings for Elena Kagan begin today. Kagan is a bit of a mystery to most people because she doesn’t have a huge paper trail to follow. Apparently Republicans are having trouble with framing their arguments. They’re planning on painting her as anti-military because of the Harvard policy to bar discriminatory organizations from recruiting on campus (a policy started by her predecessor which was overturned by the Supreme Court). Apparently they’re also trying a newer strategy – she’s bad because Obama picked her.
Senate Republicans have struggled of late to come up with a coherent line of attack — though, as of yesterday, there was still plenty of rhetoric about a possible filibuster — and today, a leading Republican senator trotted out a new argument.
Judiciary Committee member Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) wrote in a column Sunday evening that “it is reasonable to worry that [Elana] Kagan is a judicial activist simply because President Obama nominated her.” […]
“The president’s judicial nominees over the past 17 months show an unmistakable determination to create a more activist federal judiciary,” Cornyn writes of Obama’s picks for lower federal courts.
I kind of like this, in large part because the argument reflects a certain degree of honesty. Why don’t Republicans like Kagan for the high court? Because President Obama nominated her. Cornyn’s concession makes this plain — if the president chose her, she necessarily has to be considered suspect.
This kind of partisanship is the opposite of substantive criticism, but I do enjoy the argument’s circular quality — Republicans are inclined to oppose Obama’s nominees because they’re Obama’s nominees.
Well, you can’t argue that this isn’t honest.
Some commenters on the thread point out that even the July 3rd deadline is not that simple, since West Virginia has already closed its candidate filing.
Does nobody want to Tea Party? The Tea Party Nation convention scheduled for July has been moved to October, two weeks from when the event was supposed to take place.
But event organizers decided to give it another shot, scheduling another convention for July. Will this one generate a little more excitement? Not so much.
A National Tea Party Unity convention that was scheduled to be held in Las Vegas in July will now take place in October, according to organizers.
The event, organized by Tea Party Nation (a national Tea Party organization) and Free America (a conservative non-profit group) and other organizations, will still be held at the Palazzo Las Vegas Resort. But Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips confirmed to CNN Saturday that the date is being moved from July 15-17 to October in order to hold the event closer to the midterm elections.
“We concluded it would more advantageous to hold the convention in the middle of October just prior to the November elections,” says Phillips in a statement.
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The more interesting angle to this, though, is what the report didn’t mention — the “National Tea Party Unity” convention is being postponed just two weeks before it was scheduled to kick off. I’m not an expert in conference management, but it seems to me that a national group doesn’t organize a major gathering at a Las Vegas resort, lining up speakers and guests, and then scrap the whole thing two weeks before it begins unless no one was planning to show up.
Everyone’s tired of the teabaggers already.