To the Editor:
As a proud liberal, I am disappointed with President Obama’s nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.
Over the past few years, the activist judges on the Roberts court have broken their confirmation hearing vows to act as umpires and “call balls and strikes.” In ruling after ruling they have replaced the doctrine of stare decisis (adherence to precedent) with the doctrines of a results-driven, conservative legal agenda.
I was hoping, therefore, that President Obama would use the occasion of Justice John Paul Stevens’s retirement to appoint a judge with a proven liberal record, someone who would push back against these conservative judicial activists.
With the exception of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (and perhaps Sonia Sotomayor; it’s too early to tell), every nominee to the Supreme Court since 1971 has been more conservative than his or her predecessor. While it is impossible to predict Ms. Kagan’s rulings from the bench, I believe that her appointment continues this trend.
I find it disturbing and ironic that the court may well be more conservative at the end of President Obama’s first term than it was at the beginning.
Richard Kavesh
Nyack, N.Y., May 10, 2010
Note from KBJ: Does the letter writer seriously believe that anyone advocates adherence to precedent as an absolute rule (i.e., a rule without exceptions)? Precedent has weight; it does not have infinite weight, even to a conservative. This is a perfect example of the straw-person fallacy: finding fault with an argument that one's opponent does not make, and then concluding that the opponent's argument is defective. The letter writer needs a course in critical thinking.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 