Could someone come up with an alternate explanation for me?

[erinlefey]

[Public]

I'm really, really trying to avoid the "Democrats=Good, Republicans=Bad" arguments. It gets us nowhere. Life's more complex than that. There are great views on each side, if they are analyzed carefully. There's also a lot of stupid views on both sides.

That being said, there is a particular...thing...going on with Republicans right now that just baffles the crap out of me. During the ongoing Supreme Court confirmation hearings, top Republicans complained about a judicial activist, someone whose views were out of the mainstream, a judicial philosphy that concerned them greatly.

No, not Elena Kagan. They were talking about THURGOOD MARSHALL. They mentioned him 35 times. As a side note, Justice Marshall was already confirmed by the Senate...43 years ago. The man died in 1993.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/28/AR2010062805129.html?waporef=obinsite

I don't get it.

Elena Kagan is going to be confirmed. It's pretty well guaranteed, unless she sets the table on fire during questioning or jumps onto the table to do a strip-tease. Republicans could say nothing, or read a magazine, it wouldn't change the outcome one whit.

So why, repeatedly, would they talk badly about one of the most well-known and honored justices of the last century? One who happens to be a major Civil Rights leader. Who is the first African-American justice on the Supreme Court. He's the lawyer who argued Brown v. Board of Education and won! Ended "separate but equal"! Appeared before the Supreme Court 32 times, and won 29 of them! Won Browder v. Gayle, which ended the Montgomery bus boycott! Seriously, go look up Thurgood Marshall in Wikipedia. He was crucially involved in so many civil rights victories.

Republicans want to clarify that they are against THIS?

And, just to make the optics worse, one of the Repblicans leading these charges is Jeff Sessions. Properly known as Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III from Alabama. You can't get a better "Old South" name than that.

I mean, was there a point to this? All I can see is cranky old white people fussing about the world being different from the 1950's, and they don't like it, with a nice dose of "uppity black people" thrown in.

Is there something there other than that? I really want there to be. Help me out.

Comments

[red-tanya.livejournal.com]

the journalists are saying that there's also a "look over here at this mess! No, ignore that whole Citizens United ruling. Don't look at THAT! aw, mannnn..." kinda thing going on.

In other words, guys like Cornyn think they're better off slamming "activist" judges than opening up a conversation about how our country deals with corporations and their interests.

[erinlefey.livejournal.com]

But it still doesn't make them look good. I can buy the distraction argument. But by knocking one of the most revered civil rights leaders of the 1900's?

I just don't see the gain, and see lots of downside.

[longshot14.livejournal.com]

The good news is, you're right in that there isn't much gain and is a long-term drawback for the GOP to be doing this. But they can't seem to stop themselves. The party's in a crisis, in that the inexorable tide of demographics is slowly marginalizing a lot of their core cultural issues.

See the following article from 538:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/06/emerging-republican-minority.html

[red-tanya.livejournal.com]

*shrug* beats me. If I tried to explain everything Cornyn did, that would be more than a full-time gig...