When I saw that Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network had spent nearly an hour discussing Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court with Terry Jeffrey, editor in chief of CNSNews.com, I certainly wasn’t expecting it to be exciting.
But I didn’t expect it to be downright painful … but that is exactly what it was, as Jeffrey tried to use the Citizen’s United decision, which he held up as a fundamental victory for the First Amendment, to make the case that Kagan should have resigned her position as Solicitor General rather than try to strip Americans of their basic rights.
To their credit, both Whelan and Severino repeatedly shot down Jeffrey’s claims … but it didn’t matter, as every explanation they offered just seemed to further convince Jeffrey that government lawyers and Supreme Court justices and basically all lawyers are morally unfit to hold public office on the grounds that they are willing to argue positions with which they might not agree.
All of this eventually leads Jeffrey to start asking random hypothetical questions about whether an anti-choice Solicitor General who worked for a pro-choice administration would be morally fit to hold the office … as if that is relevant to anything at all.
So if you want to see the single least informative discussion of Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination, jump ahead to the 5:00 mark of this video and watch as Whelan and Severino struggle to deal with Jeffrey’s never-ending stream of nonsense:
