Mister we could use a judge like Tony Kennedy again

I haven’t paid much attention to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, because it has always had the flavor of a publicity stunt, and what’s the worst thing that could result from something like that?

But it seems likely that “Mayor Pete” — your centrist Democrat’s favorite diversity candidate — is going to be around for a long, long time, so this is the kind of thing that shouldn’t pass unremarked:

So I’ve floated several ideas and deliberately kept some level of open-mindedness about which ones are going to work best. One of them would be to have 15 members, but 5 of them can only be seated if the other 10 unanimously agree. The idea here is you get more justices who think for themselves. Justices like Justice Kennedy or Justice Souter, and there are many legal scholars who think this could be done without a constitutional amendment under current law.

Notice how Kennedy’s reputation for centrism is transformed by Mayor Centrist into the ability to “think for oneself,” as opposed to being, you know, a manifestation of Kennedy’s putative centrism — which of course is just as much an ideological position as any other.

What’s even worse is that this reputation was mostly unearned: Kennedy was (vaguely, occasionally) “centrist” only in a context in which nearly half the court is made up of hard-right reactionaries. And this composition was itself a product of the hijacking of the political process by . . . wait for it . . . the right wing of the Supreme Court, with the full participation of reasonable moderate centrist Anthony Kennedy.

Anyway, Buttigieg is all set to spend the next several decades as the darling of reactionary centrists everywhere, so I guess we had better get used to it.

On a related note, Elena Kagan had lunch with the law faculty here in Boulder yesterday, even as a couple of dozen Republican members of Congress were engaging in an overtly fascistic attempt to block the normal legislative process via the threat of violence, with the full blessing of the president and the House minority leader.

She spent about half an hour answering questions, and it was one of the most depressing public events I’ve ever attended. For one thing, Kagan spent a good deal of time showering fulsome praise on John Roberts and Anthony Scalia, as if those two men hadn’t played — and in one case very much continue to play — a key role in enabling the disgusting and disturbing spectacle unfolding inside the Capitol even at that very moment.

Yet not for one moment during the proceedings was there the slightest acknowledgement on anyone’s part that there might be anything problematic about the state of the nation, let alone the Supreme Court itself.

Of course Even the Liberal Elena Kagan basically agrees with Pete Buttigieg’s assessment of Anthony Kennedy’s jurisprudential legacy, so the ubiquitous air of self-satisfied complacency that marked our little soiree deep inside the Boulder bubble could hardly be considered a surprise.