Kagan Hearings Are "Full of Ghosts"

Slate Magazine: The Kagan Hearings, by Dahlia Lithwick:

Elena Kagan's confirmations are about whether she's really John Roberts or Thurgood Marshall.

There is something achingly familiar about Monday afternoon's opening day of Solicitor General Elena Kagan's Supreme Court Senate confirmation hearings. The talking points on both sides—"liberal judicial activist" and "justices who understand real people"—are so overused that at first you think you just might be listening to the mix tape Chief Justice John Roberts prepared for Justice Samuel Alito's hearings. It's not just Kagan who's being interrogated, though: It's Thurgood Marshall, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Sonia Sotomayor. And it's not just that Republican and Democratic senators are applying the same boring old scripts to a brand new nominee. They're actually applying the same boring old scripts to the same boring old nominees. . . .