Saturday, August 07, 2010

EASY ANSWERS TO STUPID QUESTIONS?

I was tempted to react to Jonathan Chait's New Republic blog post "Is Kagan Obama's Last Justice?" by saying, "Yes. This has been another edition of Easy Answers to Stupid Questions" (perhaps adding that TNR seems to be making a habit of asking such questions right now; elsewhere there's a post teased with the headline "Will Pakistan Ever Be the Ally We Need It To Be?," for which the obvious answer is "No").

But I'll respond with a prediction I've made a couple of times before: that, yes, of course the near-GOP-majority post-November 2010 Senate will filibuster any Supreme Court nominee (and perhaps any judicial nominee the White House recommends of its own volition. However -- given that the point of the next Congress, for Republicans, will be to humiliate the president at every possible moment, I think the GOP will say Obama can win judicial approval if he offers up nominees chosen from a GOP-provided list, which will be heavy with members of the Federalist Society. And, frankly, I think the desperately-eager-to-please Obama might go for it. So maybe it's not a stupid question with an easy answer.

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