The "No's" Are At It Again

" Obama could have nominated Moses for the Supreme Court and the Republicans would be asking for his birth certificate." so said Senator Patrick Leahey, Democrat. He certainly had that right. It seems that the only agenda that the Republican party has is to make sure that they scuttle everything Obama tries to accomplish.

The party of "No" has not come up with a single plausible way to create jobs, reign in the banks, end the wars, or help the economy. Their mission is to stop Obama PERIOD.

And so this negative GOP party are still refusing, after over a year, to approve nominees to head committees requested by the President. The result is that vital work does not get done, the country suffers and the people blame Obama.

Predictably, the RNC is criticizing Elana Kagan, the president's nominee for the Supreme Court even before her nomination.

Following is an article from the Huffington Post by Doug Kendall, President of Constitutional Accountability Center. I have edited it for brevity.

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Thurgood Marshall, Elena Kagan, and Our Constitution Today

Before President Obama even finished announcing Elena Kagan as his Supreme Court nominee, the Republican National Committee (RNC) was up with an attack memo questioning Kagan's commitment to our Constitution, asking, ominously, whether she "still views the Constitution 'as originally drafted and conceived' as 'defective'?"

The RNC had to look long and hard to find something to attack. They came up with a tribute Kagan delivered on the death of Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom Kagan clerked. She notes that Marshall, the great grandson of a slave, viewed the Constitution, which as originally drafted allowed slavery to flourish in the American south, as "defective," at least in that regard.(Slavery)

Kagan quotes a speech delivered by Justice Marshall on the Bicentennial of our Constitution that chronicles the arc of our constitutional progress. Marshall notes that it "took a bloody civil war before the Thirteenth Amendment could be adopted to abolish slavery." He hails the Fourteenth Amendment for "ensuring protection of life, liberty and property of all persons," but explains that it took almost a century for those rights to be meaningfully enforced in this country. He declares his intention to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution by recognizing that "several amendments, a civil war, and [a] momentous social transformation" were necessary to "attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today."

Not only is this history unimpeachable, it is hard to imagine anyone living Marshall's life seeing the Constitution differently. If Marshall's speech can be critiqued it is for this one reason: the great Justice seemed unable or unwilling, in this instance, to acknowledge the genius of our founders in many areas, while also critiquing their undeniable flaws such as the willingness to acquiesce to slavery. General Kagan clearly is able to see both the founders' genius and their flaws. In a powerful speech of her own delivered in 2007at West Point, then-Dean Kagan spoke to the cadets about the Constitution and the rule of law. Kagan explained that in a bold break from all prior world and military history, our 1787 founders demanded in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution that military officers and every other government official swear loyalty not to a General or a President, but to the Constitution. Kagan called fidelity to the Constitution and the rule of law "the foundation stone of our society," and she gave powerful examples of what fidelity to the Constitution and the law entails.

The biggest difference between conservatives and liberals on the Supreme Court today is not the silly dispute about whether the Constitution is living or dead, it's about how much weight to accord the Amendments that have been ratified over the past 200 years. Conservatives tend to treat the Amendments -- particularly the post-Civil War 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and the 19th Amendment, which secured political equality for women - as tinkering around the constitutional edges; liberals think these Amendments changed the entire fabric of the document.

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More Cacti blooms. Until the Saguaros flaunt their blossoms this will probably be the last of this year's crop.

Notice: After four hours spent trying to change the size of the text I have bowed to Bloggers demand that the text either must be too large or too small. Sorry about that, but I have given up fighting to post the draft the way the original is on my composition. I hope you can read the small print and don't think I am shouting with the big print. (Well, maybe I am.)