This is the ninth installment of Constitutional Accountability Center’s new series, ‘Strange Brew: The Constitution According to the Tea Party,’ exploring the Tea Party’s erroneous claims about the Constitution’s text and history.  Click here to view previous posts from this series.
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by Elizabeth Wydra, Chief Counsel, Constitutional Accountability Center

Somewhat surprisingly, even in the curious world of the Tea Party, several Tea Party Senate candidates have been asking people to vote for them precisely because they want to take away the people’s right to vote for them.  In other words, they are running on a platform that includes a call to repeal the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, which shifted the selection of U.S. Senators from the state legislatures to direct election by voters.   Such a repeal proposal is foolhardy—and not just because it banks on the rather ridiculous proposition that voters will turn out to vote to support taking away their right to vote.

It seems unlikely that voters will go for it.  “We the People” have passed six amendments expanding the right to vote, and the entire thrust of our constitutional history is toward expanding our democratic process, not taking choices away from voters.  But the movement to repeal the 17th Amendment is serious enough that the New York Times devoted an editorial piece to the issue, noting:

Allowing Americans to choose their own senators seems so obvious that it is hard to remember that the nation’s founders didn’t really trust voters with the job. The people were given the right to elect House members. But senators were supposed to be a check on popular rowdiness and factionalism. They were appointed by state legislatures, filled with men of property and stature.

Under the original Constitution, U.S. Senators were chosen not by the people, but by state legislators. Article 1, Section 3 of the Constitution provided that “the Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state, chosen by the legislature thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote.” The 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, was part of a wave of progressive constitutional reforms that sought to make the Constitution, and our nation, more democratic.  It gave Americans the right to vote directly for their Senators, thereby strengthening the link between citizens and the federal government.  (Whether Senators have been more or less able to serve as a check on “popular rowdiness” since adoption of the 17th Amendment is debatable, but considering that the Tea Party has the rowdiest party on the block right now, it is surprising that they would advocate returning to a more restrained, aristocratic vision of the Senate.) Read more »

This is the eighth installment of Constitutional Accountability Center’s new series, ‘Strange Brew: The Constitution According to the Tea Party,’ exploring the Tea Party’s erroneous claims about the Constitution’s text and history.  Click here to view previous posts from this series.
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by David Gans, Director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights & Citizenship Program, Constitutional Accountability Center

A rather surprising flash point in the confirmation debate over Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has been the argument by Tea Party members and allies that Kagan should not be confirmed because of Kagan’s testimony that her job as a Justice would be to “enforce the Constitution and the laws,” and that she doesn’t have a view about the protection of natural rights “independent of the Constitution.”  Tea-partiers are up in arms because Kagan limited herself to the protections set out in the Constitution, and did not embrace the Declaration of Independence as a source of “God-given inalienable rights” as Republican Senators Tom Coburn and Charles Grassley repeatedly pressed her to.  According to Rush Limbaugh, “She is basically just throwing the whole concept of natural law down the toilet and flushing it.  She is throwing the Declaration of Independence down the toilet.”   A whole host of Tea Party-affiliated websites parrot the identical claim – Kagan cannot be trusted to protect the liberties of Americans because of her “opposition” to the Declaration.

But in fact, Kagan’s basic point is unimpeachable.  A critical aspect of the job of a Supreme Court Justice is to decide cases brought under the Constitution, and that means looking to the Constitution, and not to the Declaration of Independence or natural law.  Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas have both made identical points, and no one has suggested this makes them unfit as Justices.  For example, Justice Scalia wrote in a 2000 dissenting opinion that “The Declaration of Independence . . . is not a legal prescription conferring powers on the courts,” while Justice Thomas told the Judiciary Committee in his 1991 confirmation hearing that he “did not see a role for the use of natural law in constitutional adjudication.”  So Kagan’s testimony is nothing new. Read more »

This is the seventh installment of Constitutional Accountability Center’s new series, ‘Strange Brew: The Constitution According to the Tea Party,’ exploring the Tea Party’s erroneous claims about the Constitution’s text and history.  Click here to view previous posts from this series.

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by Elizabeth Wydra, Chief Counsel, Constitutional Accountability Center

As we noted in last week’s post taking on the Tea Party’s constitutional challenges to the “individual mandate,” the greatest rallying point for Tea Party opposition to federal government power is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the historic health care reform law enacted earlier this year.  The Tea Partiers’ heated rhetoric is reaching a boiling point with the upcoming elections.  Republican Rep. Zach Wamp, running for governor in Tennessee, suggested over the weekend that states should think about seceding from the Union because of the health care law, echoing a similar, earlier call from Texas Governor Rick Perry.  Several state attorneys general and governors have filed lawsuits challenging the Act — including one filed by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, and another by a group of state officials led by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum — alleging that the Act exceeds Congress’s powers and infringes upon state sovereignty.   Virginia and Idaho have passed, and other states are considering, “nullification” laws that attempt to block implementation of the Act outright, a tactic not seriously pursued since a handful of states tried to block implementation of federal civil rights laws in the 1950s and ’60s.

Tea Party claims that federal health care reform violates the Constitution’s 10th Amendment and “states’ rights” rely on an inaccurate view of the federal government as a weak, sharply limited central government— a claim that CAC recently debunked in the Issue Brief, Setting the Record Straight: The Tea Party and the Constitutional Powers of the Federal Government— and a distorted understanding of federalism.  In reality, our Constitution creates a vibrant system of federalism that gives broad power to the federal government to act in circumstances in which a national approach is necessary or preferable, while reserving a significant role for the states to craft innovative policy solutions reflecting the diversity of America’s people, places, and ideas.  In addition, the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause gives the federal government the authority to enforce these lines of authority, preempting state law when necessary to achieve a national goal. Read more »

This is the sixth installment of Constitutional Accountability Center’s new series, ‘Strange Brew: The Constitution According to the Tea Party,’ exploring the Tea Party’s erroneous claims about the Constitution’s text and history. Click here to view previous posts from this series.
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by Doug Kendall, President & Founder, Constitutional Accountability Center

Perhaps the single most disturbing thing about the rise of the Tea Party as a growing force in American politics is the frequency with which the movement’s most notable figures have rallied the faithful with talk of armed rebellion or revolution, often invoking the Framers in support of this call to political violence:

• Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has said “America is ready for another revolution and you and I are a part of this,” and told her supporters after the passage of the health care bill: “Don’t Retreat, Instead ‐ RELOAD!”
• Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota has claimed “it was Thomas Jefferson who said, a revolution every now and then is a good thing.  What do you think?”
• Senate candidate Sharron Angle of Nevada took the Jefferson analogy one step further, telling conservative talk radio host Lars Larson,  “In fact, Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years,  I hope that’s not where we’re going. But, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.”
• Rick Barber, an Alabama candidate for Congress, wins the “craziest Tea Party candidate ever” award for this ad featuring an actor dressed as George Washington rallying Tea Partiers to “gather your armies,” as a response to progressive taxation.

With anger high in this country in response to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and with the rise of armed extremist groups since President Obama took office, these comments are just about as smart as throwing a lighted match into a powder keg.   As Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush wrote in a column for the Washington Post, comments like Angle’s lack “the seriousness of genuine sedition,” but should, nonetheless, be “disqualifying for public office.”

More important for present purposes, these comments get our constitutional history fundamentally wrong.  As Gerson puts it, they are “so far from the moral weightiness of the Founders that it mocks their memory.”  Demonstrating the disconnect between Tea Party rhetoric invoking Founding principles and our actual constitutional history is the point of Constitutional Accountability Center’s ongoing series, Strange Brew: The Constitution According to the Tea Party, so this article will pick things up from there. Read more »

This is the fifth installment of Constitutional Accountability Center’s new series, ‘Strange Brew: The Constitution According to the Tea Party,’ exploring the Tea Party’s erroneous claims about the Constitution’s text and history.  Click here to view previous posts from this series.
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by David Gans, Director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights & Citizenship Program, Constitutional Accountability Center

Given the anti-tax fervor in the Tea Party set, it’s not surprising that repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment is high on the Tea Party’s constitutional agenda.  The Amendment, after all, was added to the Constitution in 1913 to make clear that Congress has the “power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived . . . .”  Tea Party luminaries like Senate candidate Sharron Angle of Nevada, and a host of other Tea Party activists, have called for repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment, making the claim that this grant of taxing power was a harmful addition to the Constitution that increased the size and power of the federal government at the expense of the people.

Once again, the Tea Party’s vision of the Constitution is exactly backward.  The power to tax, including the power to impose a tax on income, was a power of the federal government since the Founding.  The Sixteenth Amendment was enacted to restore this power after the Supreme Court ‘s 1896  decision in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. overturned a federal income tax, disregarding clear constitutional history and a century of the Court’s precedents to reach its desired result.  In trying to forbid Congress from imposing an income tax, the Tea Party is trying to repeal a power given by the Founders they purport to revere.  Doing so would be a serious constitutional mistake.

Article I, Section 8 of the Founders’ Constitution begins by giving to Congress the “Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States . . . .” This provision was necessary to overcome one of the great problems that hindered the federal government under the Articles of Confederation – its inability to raise money to support the federal government.  As Akhil Amar’s splendid history of the Constitution shows, in the aftermath of the abject failure of the Articles of Confederation, Americans chose to “authorize a sweeping regime of continental taxes . . . .”  The Founders recognized a “decisive difference” between the imperial taxes they had protested at the Boston Tea Party, and the new taxes they authorized in the Constitution, “decided on by public servants chosen by the American people themselves – taxation with representation.”  While the Boston Tea Partiers had objected to imperial taxes imposed by a legislature in which Americans had no voice, the Founders recognized that taxation approved by the people’s representatives in Congress was necessary to ensure the federal government could fulfill its constitutional responsibilities. Read more »

This is the fourth installment of Constitutional Accountability Center’s new series, ‘Strange Brew: The Constitution According to the Tea Party,’ exploring the Tea Party’s erroneous claims about the Constitution’s text and history.  Click here to view previous posts from this series.
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by Elizabeth Wydra, Chief Counsel, Constitutional Accountability Center

Though the legal battle over Arizona’s controversial new immigration law is only just heating up, state legislators affiliated with the Arizona Tea Party are reportedly working on yet another piece of tough legislation aimed at stemming illegal immigration, this one intended to prevent the children of undocumented immigrants from obtaining “birthright citizenship.”  Buoyed by anti-immigrant sentiment and general frustration in the state, these Arizona legislators are undeterred by the fact that such citizenship is guaranteed by our Constitution, in the strikingly clear language of the Fourteenth Amendment that reads:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Some, like State Senator Russell Pearce in Arizona, refuse to accept that this language covers children of undocumented immigrants.  Other prominent Tea Party allies – including Rand Paul (of Kentucky) and Rep. Duncan Hunter (of San Diego) – have called for an outright repeal of this portion of the Fourteenth Amendment.  But Tea Partiers who want to read the Amendment’s citizenship clause narrowly to allow discrimination against U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants are simply wrong as a matter of constitutional text and history.  And those who want to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal citizenship threaten core constitutional values and ignore the reasons why the framers of the Amendment enshrined birthright citizenship in the Constitution in the first place.

Contrary to claims made by the Tea Party and other conservatives, the 19th century framers of the Fourteenth Amendment unambiguously intended to grant equal citizenship to children born in the United States without regard to the status or origins of their parents.  It was clear at the time the Amendment was drafted and ratified that the birthright citizenship clause would apply to a child whose parents were uninvited immigrants or a child born to parents brought to the United States as part of illegal slave trafficking, just as it would to a child whose parents were descended from English pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower. Read more »

This is the third installment of Constitutional Accountability Center’s new series, ‘Strange Brew: The Constitution According to the Tea Party,’ exploring the Tea Party’s erroneous claims about the Constitution’s text and history.  Click here to view previous posts from this series.
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by David Gans, Director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights & Citizenship Program, Constitutional Accountability Center

A recurring theme within the Tea Party movement is that the Constitution provides no, or extremely limited, authority for the federal government to interfere with private discrimination.  Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul caused a small firestorm earlier this year by suggesting that he opposed the portions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibit racial discrimination by private businesses providing public accommodations.  The outrage following his comments quickly forced Paul to backtrack at least somewhat, though he has still not said, unequivocally, that he supports federal laws banning discrimination by privately-owned establishments and believes these laws are constitutional.  Paul’s views are part of a larger Tea Party campaign to roll back federal regulation of private businesses – a leading Tea Party website TeaPartyPatriots.org flatly “oppose[s] government intervention into the operations of private business” – and to strictly limit, if not outright repeal, the protections available under the constitutional amendments added after the Civil War to guarantee liberty and equality for all Americans.  At the outer fringes of the Tea Party, Mark Williams, one of the leaders of the Tea Party Express, went so far as to suggest, in a racist “satirical” diatribe, the repeal of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, and that the slaves would have been better off remaining in bondage.

While the Tea Party likes to wrap itself in the mantle of the Founders’ Constitution – as in this photo of Mark Williams speaking with the Constitution’s Preamble as his backdrop – it consistently gets the text and history of the Constitution wrong.  Both the Commerce Clause contained in Article I of the Founders’ Constitution as well as Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment plainly give Congress the power to ban racial discrimination by private businesses that run public accommodations.

As this Issue Brief by CAC documents, at the Founding, “We the People” created a federal government of defined but substantial powers, including the power to strike out at local commercial practices that jeopardize free trade.  The Commerce Clause is unquestionably a broad power, expressly giving Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce, traffic, and intercourse.  In 1964, in the landmark case of Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the public accommodations provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act under the Commerce Clause, pointing out that racial barriers thrown up by Jim Crow were hampering the free flow of interstate commerce.   No Justice of the Supreme Court has ever questioned the correctness of Heart of Atlanta’s holding, including Justice Thomas, who has long urged the Court to dramatically cut back on the recognized reach of the Commerce Clause.  For good reason, Heart of Atlanta is a foundational part of our law.  Congress must have substantial power to forbid commercial practices – such as racial discrimination – that hinder free trade of goods and services.

Just as important, Heart of Atlanta’s holding that Congress has the power to prohibit racial discrimination by businesses that operate places of public accommodation finds deep support in the text and history of the Fourteenth Amendment.  In fact, two Justices in Heart of Atlanta specifically concurred to explain that the Fourteenth Amendment gave Congress the power to enact the public accommodation provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Constitutional Accountability Center’s report entitled The Shield of National Protection: The Text & History of Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, available here, shows why the power of Congress to legislate against private actors who engage in invidious discrimination is firmly rooted in the text and history of the Constitution.

The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment wrote Section 5 to give Congress authority to regulate the actions of state officials and private actors to protect the liberty and equality of the newly freed slaves and their allies.  Acting against the backdrop of efforts to re-establish slavery, as well merciless violence perpetrated by former rebels and white terrorist groups against the freed slaves and their Union allies in the South, the framers sought to ensure that Congress would have broad legislative authority to protect civil rights, whether under attack by private actors or government officials.  In fact, Congress’ very first piece of civil rights legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, applied to both state actors and private actors, and it is universally recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment was written to ensure that Congress had the power to pass the 1866 Act.  Nothing in this history gave private businesses a free pass to discriminate. Read more »

This is the second installment of Constitutional Accountability Center’s new series, ‘Strange Brew: The Constitution According to the Tea Party,’ exploring the Tea Party’s erroneous claims about the Constitution’s text and history.  Click here to view previous posts from this series.

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by Elizabeth Wydra, Chief Counsel, Constitutional Accountability Center

Without a doubt, the greatest rallying point for Tea Party opposition to federal government power is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the historic health care reform law enacted earlier this year.  Reflecting Tea Partiers’ outrage, several state attorneys general and governors have filed lawsuits challenging the Act — including one filed by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, and another by a group of state officials led by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum — alleging that the Act exceeds Congress’s powers and infringes upon state sovereignty.   Similarly, Virginia and Idaho have passed “nullification” laws that attempt to block implementation of the Act outright.  Every Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee recently echoed the Tea Party’s concerns in Washington, joining a letter designed to prevent Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan from hearing any challenges to the health care bill if they came before the Supreme Court.  Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) stated in his questions to Kagan that if the health care reform legislation is upheld “it seems to me there is no limit to the federal government’s authority and we’ve come a long, long way from what our founders intended.”

Yet such attacks on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act are entirely without merit. Contrary to Tea Party rhetoric, Congress’s authority to pass legislation to fix problems in the health care industry, which comprises approximately 20 percent of the U.S. economy, is firmly rooted in the Constitution, in particular through the provisions in Article I, section 8 authorizing Congress to regulate interstate commerce and to tax and spend for the general welfare, as well as to enact laws that are necessary and proper in exercising its other powers.

This post will address the Tea Party’s constitutional claims regarding the individual mandate.  Later in our Strange Brew series, we will take on the arguments that the Affordable Care Act is a violation of state sovereignty and the Tenth Amendment; we will also demonstrate that state efforts to block the health care reform bill –through local “nullification” efforts – run squarely into the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause and the lessons learned in the Civil War and, more recently, the Civil Rights Era, when nullification efforts were last seriously attempted by the states. Read more »

A New Series Dedicated to Setting the Record Straight on the Constitution

To mark this year’s Independence Day, the Tea Party went back to school to study the Constitution as part of a growing effort to use the document to wage political battle—particularly over the confirmation of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court—and to elect leaders who will remain faithful to the Constitution and its principles. As an organization dedicated to the text and history of the Constitution, Constitutional Accountability Center salutes this effort, at least in the abstract. We think the Constitution should frame our political debates and should be followed by our leaders, whatever their political stripe. But if the Tea Party wants to be taken seriously—and if it wants the media to continue fawning over it for its purported love for the Constitution—it should at least be required to make plausible claims about the words and meaning of our Nation’s charter. A close look at the Tea Party’s version of the Constitution shows that it bears little resemblance to our actual Constitution and could in fact threaten the constitutional values Americans cherish most.

At the risk of taking too seriously what appear to be political arguments dressed up as constitutional claims, Constitutional Accountability Center has launched a series of articles, here at Text & History, which examines claims made by the Tea Party and its most prominent allies about the Constitution and put them to the test against the Constitution’s text and history. The series, entitled Strange Brew: The Constitution According to the Tea Party, draws upon the words of our nation’s charter, constitutional debates and other legislative history, and the best constitutional scholarship available. The goal of the series is to ensure that, as Americans engage in conversations and debates about the Constitution, we are all on the same page about what our Constitution says and what it doesn’t.

Our Strange Brew series was launched with the release of a new CAC Issue Brief entitled “Setting the Record Straight: The Tea Party and the Constitutional Powers of the Federal Government.” This Issue Brief, written by CAC’s Chief Counsel Elizabeth Wydra and CAC’s Human and Civil Rights Director David Gans, takes on the Tea Partiers’ central claim: that our country’s Founders established a sharply limited, weak national government, incapable of addressing national problems like the health care crisis in America. Our Issue Brief documents first that the Founders established the federal government to act whenever the states were “separately incompetent” and granted the federal government broad power to, among other things, regulate interstate commerce and tax and spend to promote the general welfare. The Tea Party’s principal claim of a weak national government fits more with the failed, discarded Articles of Confederation than with the Founders’ second and lasting attempt to craft a national charter, our Constitution.

Second, putting aside the correctness of the Tea Party claims regarding the Constitution as it was written in 1787, we chronicle how eight separate amendments expanded the enumerated powers of the federal government, giving vast powers to the government to protect equality, civil rights, and voting rights and to raise funds through taxes on income. Amendments such as the 17th Amendment, which took the power of electing U.S. senators away from state legislators and gave it to the people by popular vote, structurally increased the power of the federal government, vis-à-vis the states.

Leading up to the floor debate over the confirmation of Elena Kagan, CAC is building on the work of the Issue Brief in a series of posts on our flagship blog, Text & History. Our Strange Brew blog series takes on the various and sometimes repugnant specific claims about the Constitution being made by Tea Party candidates such as Rand Paul and Sharron Angle, by Senators opposing the confirmation of Elena Kagan, and by other elected officials such as Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. Here are some of the topics we cover in the Strange Brew series:

• The persistent and heated claims in the courts, Congress, and the media that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — and particular its “individual mandate” –  is unconstitutional, and the suggestion by Senate Republicans that General Kagan should not be confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice because she might uphold the Act.  (Read Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.)
• The long-discredited assertion by Kentucky Senate Rand Paul, Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams, and others that the federal government does not have the power to root out “private” discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the most important pieces of legislation passed pursuant to Congress’s constitutional authority to enforce the 14^th Amendment’s guarantee of equality.  (Read this post here.)
• The call by Rand Paul, Rep. Duncan Hunter and others for the repeal of the 14^th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship at birth for all children born in the United States, and the efforts in states such as Arizona to interfere with the Amendment’s guarantee of equal citizenship.  (Read this post here.)
• Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle’s suggestion that Americans should repeal the 16^th Amendment, which allows for a federal income tax.  (Read this post here.)
• Disturbing Tea Party rhetoric suggesting that perceived unconstitutional actions by the federal government are cause for armed rebellion—and the claim that the Founders would cheer such violence. (Read this post here.)
• The argument by Senator Tom Coburn and others that Kagan should not be confirmed because she, in their view, would not commit during her Judiciary Committee testimony to enforcing “God-given” natural or inalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. (Read this post here.)
• The call by Tea Party activists for repeal of the 17^th Amendment, in order to take the power to elect U.S. Senators away from individual voters and give it back to state legislators.
• Utah Senate candidate Mike Lee’s argument that his state can use the Constitution’s “Enclave Clause” to take land from the federal government in Utah.

As the Senate begins to debate Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court and the Tea Party continues to focus Americans’ attention on the U.S. Constitution, it is important that this national conversation engage the real Constitution and not the Tea Party’s Constitution. There are plenty of good faith disagreements to be had over our Constitution’s text, history and meaning—but we’ve all got to be reading the same document. With our Issue Brief and the Strange Brew blog series, Constitutional Accountability Center hopes to set the record straight on the Constitution.

by Judith E. Schaeffer, Vice-President, Constitutional Accountability Center

This weekend, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), a member and former Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, published an op-ed setting out his “case” against the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, who currently serves as Solicitor General of the United States.  The Senator’s op-ed was mostly unremarkable, pretty much hitting all of the conservatives’ talking points against General Kagan, including the beaten-to-death claim that Kagan is hostile to the military.  Such distortions of a nominee’s record have, sadly, become standard fare in judicial confirmation battles, and so we will leave them to the side for now and make only the observation that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously made, which is that Senator Hatch is “entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

Specifically, we were bowled over by one aspect of Senator Hatch’s “case” against General Kagan – his claim that Elena Kagan “has little legal experience of any kind,” and his related charge that Kagan has had only two years of “legal practice.”  Has Orrin Hatch been looking at the same Kagan employment history we’ve reviewed?

It’s right here on the Judiciary Committee’s web site, contained in Kagan’s answers to the Committee’s questionnaire.   Let’s take a look . . . Read more »