Another Cornyn Flip-Flop

A few days ago, President Obama nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan to replace Justice Stevens on the United States Supreme Court. In response to this, Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) only took a couple of days to embarrass himself and his home state with his rabidly anti-Obama and partisan take on the nomination.

Cornyn has never been a believer in bipartisanship. He slavishly follows the Republican party talking points no matter how silly they may be. And this time, it doesn't seem to bother Cornyn that his current spouting of a Republican talking point requires a gigantic flip-flop of a position he took just a few years ago (for a Bush nomination to the court).

Cornyn, along with Sen. McConnell (R-Kentucky) and Sen. DeMint (R-South Carolina), is saying he cannot support the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court because she has a lack of judicial experience. He says, "Ms. Kagan is likewise a surprising choice because she lacks judicial experience. Most Americans believe that prior judicial experience is a necessary credential for a Supreme Court justice."

Cornyn is ignoring (and hoping we have forgotten) the fact that he took just the opposite view in 2005 with the nomination of Harriet Miers. After Miers withdrew her nomination, Cornyn is quoted as saying, "I mean, one reason I felt so strongly about Harriet Miers's qualifications is I thought she would fill some very important gaps in the Supreme Court. Because right now you have people who've been federal judges, circuit judges most of their lives, or academicians. And what you see is a lack of grounding in reality and common sense that I think would be very beneficial."

Can Kagan not fill that "very important gap"? Not for Cornyn. He obviously thinks that something that is good for a Republican president to do, is horrible for a Democratic president to do. What partisan rubbish!

The idea that a Supreme Court justice must have a background with extensive judicial experience is pure nonsense anyway. Some of our greatest justices have not had a judicial background. Blogger tnlib at Parsley's Pics makes this very clear by posting a list of 40 Supreme Court justices without prior judicial experience. I list here only the first twenty on that list, but I urge you to go read the entire list. The president who nominated each is in parentheses.

William Rehnquist - U.S. Attorney General (Nixon)

Lewis Powell - American Bar Assoc. president (Nixon)

Abe Fortas - private practice (Johnson)

Byron White - Dep. U.S. Attorney General (Kennedy)

Arthur Goldberg - U.S. Sec. of Labor (Kennedy)

Earl Warren - Governor of California (Eisenhower)

Tom Clark - U.S. Attorney General (Truman)

Harold Burton - U.S. Senator (Truman)

Robert Jackson - U.S. Attorney General (Roosevelt)

James Francis Byrnes - U.S. Senator (Roosevelt)

William O. Douglas - S.E.C. chairman (Roosevelt)

Felix Frankfurter - Asst. U.S. Attorney (Roosevelt)

Stanley Forman Reed - U.S. Solicitor General (Roosevelt)

Owen Josephus Rogers - "Teapot Dome" Special Counsel (Hoover)

Harlan Fiske Stone - U.S. Attorney General (Coolidge)

Pierce Butler - County Attorney (Harding)

George Sutherland - U.S. Senator (Harding)

Louis Brandeis - private practice (Wilson)

James Clark McReynolds - U.S. Attorney General (Wilson)

Charles Evans Hughes - Governor of New York (Taft)