Today in the News, 3.20.09

“[I]sn’t it also the case that when you reverse, rewrite, or undermine every rule and standard you’ve ever laid out for measuring the fitness of a presidential nominee, you become ridiculous—period?” Dahlia Lithwick has a pointed piece in Slate criticizing Republican Senators for their hypocrisy in their treatment of President Obama’s nominees.

“The Kagan nomination is not controversial. Every solicitor general who served from 1985 has endorsed her nomination.” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, describing the nomination of Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan, just before the Senate confirmed her as the nation’s first female Solicitor General.

“I’m not optimistic. I’ll put it that way.” Justice Antonin Scalia responds to a question of whether his championing of originalism is a “lost cause,” in the conclusion of a five-part interview series posted by National Review Online this week. It is perhaps not coincidental that Justice Scalia is starting to lose hope just as progressives are starting to look carefully at Constitutional text and history, as documented in “Rethinking Original Intent” from this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal. Maybe Justice Scalia has been reading the same history we have.