Stop Oppressing Affluent, Expensively Educated White Men!

Yep, were going to see a lot more of this type of whining. Which, given that when it comes to Supreme Court appointments you’re obviously choosing from among a large pool of potentially good candidates rather than trying to identify the “best qualified” candidate in any meaningful sense, is even sillier than usual. Although, in fairness, I’m sure it would be difficult to find a woman who’s a towering intellectual and legal giant on the order of Anthony Kennedy.

Meanwhile, some useful information about Diane Wood and Sonia Sotomayor.

…The inevitable whining is going to be even funnier coming from Ed Whelan. In addition to the usual boilerplate about how anybody who disagrees with Ed Whelan’s assertions about what the Constitution means is insufficiently “dispassionate” and a list of potential consequences of an Obama appointee, all of which reflect positions for which there is not a single vote on the current Court, which would be a neat trick), here is his case against Elena Kagan, in its entirety:

Or Elena Kagan, who led the law schools’ opposition to military recruitment on their campuses, who used remarkably extreme rhetoric—“a profound wrong” and “a moral injustice of the first order”—to condemn the federal law on gays in the military that was approved in 1993 by a Democratic-controlled Congress and signed into law by President Clinton, and who received 31 votes against her confirmation as Solicitor General.

Oh, horrors, she opposed discrimination against the unimpeachable moral authority of Bill Clinton. How appalling! At any rate, if I understand the Republican coming position, to exclude qualified gay and lesbian people from military service entirely is not only acceptable but opposing it is downright un-American, while nominating a qualified woman to the Court while there might be a qualified white man out there is beyond the pale.