The Big Man

Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham is single-handedly trying to stop the U.S. Senate from putting its head further up its collective ass.

Read what Dana Milbank called “Graham’s penetrating indictment of the tribal logic that has overtaken his colleagues,” while explaining his yes vote for Supreme Court Elena Kagan.

“I think there’s a good reason for a conservative to vote yes, and that’s provided in the Constitution itself. The Senate should have a special and strong reason for the denial of confirmation [such as] to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from family connection, from personal attachment and from a view to popularity.”

“Seventy-three of the 126 Supreme Court nominations, were done without roll-call votes. Something’s changing when it comes to the advice-and-consent clause. . . . The question I have for the body: Are we living in an age of legislative activism where the words haven’t changed in the last 200 years, but certainly the voting patterns are?”

“No one spent more time trying to beat President Obama than I did, except maybe Senator McCain.” “[But] President Obama won. The Constitution in my view puts a requirement on me as a senator to not replace my judgment for his, not to think of the 100 reasons I would pick somebody differently or pick a fight with Ms. Kagan.”

“Objectively speaking, things are changing, and they’re unnerving to me. [It is] our obligation to honor elections. It would not have been someone I would have chosen, but the person who did choose, President Obama, I think chose wisely.”

Senator Graham at 5′ 7″ is the biggest man in the Senate, not because he voted for Ms. Kagan but why.

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Three-Fifths

Reposted from our friends at Political Irony. An excellent site.

Yesterday, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele released a statement about Obama nominating Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. His major complaint against Kagan seems to be this:

her support for statements suggesting that the Constitution “as originally drafted and conceived, was ‘defective’”

OMG, how can a nominee to the Supreme Court believe that the original constitution was defective?

Well, it turns out that Kagan was only quoting an actual Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, who in a 1993 article was using the example of how the original constitution only counted slaves as three-fifths of a person. Kagan was praising the Supreme Court for fixing that.

So ironically Steele, who is black, is attacking Kagan for supporting blacks as full people.

UPDATE: More information.

Several more takes on this here.

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Random Thoughts

Yesterday Bernard and I were chatting with the award-winning CZ graphics department, also known as Erin. After thoroughly dissecting the hidden metaphysical meanings of “Family Jewels”, discussion turned to the idea of a third political party.

As I’ve written before, I’m not a big believer that a viable third-party is a solution to what ails us. For all the proof you need just look at Great Britain right now. Three parties split the vote with no outright winner. The reality is the Liberal Democrats are now the party with all the leverage. And they only received about a fifth of the seats of the leading vote getting Conservative party.

E.J. Dionne Jr. said it well here. (more…)

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