Elena Kagan's Exclamation Points...

[Howey]

...and statement "That's amazing!! has the right wing, led by Matt Drudge, in an uproar because, when a member of Obama's Justice Department last year, she sent an email to someone after Obamacare passed. {Please Note: The source is CNS. I wouldn't be surprised if the email is a forgery, but anyhow...}

In the purported email, Kagan writes: "I hear they have the votes, Larry!! Simply amazing,"

That's it. Nothing more.

Now they're screaming like little girls (well, Drudge is), demanding Kagan recuse herself from the SCOTUS upcoming arguments on Obamacare.

Will the right demand Thomas and Scalia recuse themselves too after last week?

The day the Supreme Court gathered behind closed doors to consider the politically divisive question of whether it would hear a challenge to President Obama’s healthcare law, two of its justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, were feted at a dinner sponsored by the law firm that will argue the case before the high court.

The occasion was last Thursday, when all nine justices met for a conference to pore over the petitions for review. One of the cases at issue was a suit brought by 26 states challenging the sweeping healthcare overhaul passed by Congress last year, a law that has been a rallying cry for conservative activists nationwide.

The justices agreed to hear the suit; indeed, a landmark 5 1/2-hour argument is expected in March, and the outcome is likely to further roil the 2012 presidential race, which will be in full swing by the time the court’s decision is released.

The lawyer who will stand before the court and argue that the law should be thrown out is likely to be Paul Clement, who served as U.S. solicitor general during the George W. Bush administration.

Clement’s law firm, Bancroft PLLC, was one of almost two dozen firms that helped sponsor the annual dinner of the Federalist Society, a longstanding group dedicated to advocating conservative legal principles. Another firm that sponsored the dinner, Jones Day, represents one of the trade associations that challenged the law, the National Federation of Independent Business.

Another sponsor was pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc, which has an enormous financial stake in the outcome of the litigation. The dinner was held at a Washington hotel hours after the court's conference over the case. In attendance was, among others, Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican and an avowed opponent of the healthcare law.

The featured guests at the dinner? Scalia and Thomas.

It comes as no surprise. Thomas and Scalia are well-known as rapists of the integrity and credibility of the Supreme Court:

http://www.youtube.com/alliance4justice

[ekg]

wow.. the double !!

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo scary..

eta Matt Drudge is a  pussy!

[Howey]

wow.. the double !!

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo scary..

eta Matt Drudge is a  pussy!

You'll love this!

In the epic battle to manufacture false equivalence, score another point for critics of Justice Elena Kagan, who is now being called upon to recuse herself from next spring’s landmark Supreme Court case about the Affordable Care Act because she had (gasping, clutching heart) … a job. In a searing indictment of her deep bias on the issue of the Commerce Clause and the regulation of “inactivity,” the conservative lobby group Judicial Watch has produced eyeball-popping evidence that then-Solicitor General Kagan was in favor of the law when it was passed in 2010. And Carrie Severino, a former clerk of Clarence Thomas and chief counsel of another conservative watchdog group, the Judicial Crisis Network, called upon Kagan to recuse herself from court deliberations over the law because Kagan called meetings and sent e-mails and did other stuff that was her job—all in anticipation of lawsuits over the law.

Oh wait, one more thing. The Drudge Report blared Tuesday (with a baffling green photo of Kagan and Obama apparently taken with the aid of night-vision goggles): “Kagan Cheered Obamacare Passage” and broke the news that Kagan sent an e-mail to then-Justice Department adviser Laurence Tribe on the day the House passed the bill, saying: "I hear they have the votes, Larry!! Simply amazing." Fox News tried to double down on the pretend outrage over Kagan’s astonishment that a law had passed, but even they couldn’t find an ethics expert who agreed, nor could practically anyone else. The rationale for the call for recusal seems to be that Kagan, who did everything in her power to avoid creating a conflict of interest by delegating everything possible to her deputy Neal Katyal, has somehow shown a conflict of interest.
 
The fallback argument is that her enthusiasm for the legislation somehow represents an “opinion regarding the underlying legal or constitutional issues related to the health care legislation.” Which is a bit like saying that my enthusiasm for wheat toast reflects a constitutional view on Wickard v. Filburn. Take that, plus a healthy dollop of “we haven’t found anything but we’re still sure it’s there,” and you have the full measure of the new crop of biting recusal claims against her.
 
Not that the Supreme Court justices are bound by this, but let’s look once again at the standard described in the Judicial Code of Conduct—the rules that bar a sitting federal judge from conduct that gives the appearance of impropriety. Now “appearance of impropriety” is a very, very low standard (although it’s not so low that merely imagining impropriety would suffice). The appearance-based standard means that federal judges should not do anything to suggest to the public that they are in the tank for one side or another. But the ethics rules don’t contemplate that having worked for the Obama administration constitutes a conflict. Many justices have worked for many presidents and on many cases. To be sure, Kagan would have to step aside if she had, while in government service, worked on strategies and tactics on health care. (That is precisely why she recused herself in so many cases on other issues, which amounted to more than one-quarter of the cases heard, last term.) In cases in which she was actively involved in setting policy and strategy Kagan stepped aside. In cases in which she went out of her way to be uninvolved, she hasn’t. But the suggestion here seems to be that Kagan is compromised not for the work she did, but for the office she held—and that is a standard that does not exist in the ethics rules.
 
If anything, the fact that then-Solicitor General Kagan went out of her way not to participate in the meetings and strategy sessions surrounding the health care litigation suggests that she fully understands that appearance of improper conduct in fact counts for as much as actual misconduct. She was at pains to distance herself from this case because it would have looked bad. For which her critics now seek to, er, make her look bad. The criticisms of Kagan aren’t about the appearance of bias or impropriety, because Kagan has been pretty much obsessive about preserving appearances. And what about those who believe that her caution as solicitor was all part of an elaborate plan to get her on the court so she could vote to uphold the law? This is also irrelevant. The ethics rules don’t exist to comfort the severely paranoid. There’s medication for that.

Measure Kagan’s abundance of caution for appearances against the new outcry against Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, both of whom attended a fundraiser for the Federalist Society last Thursday, just hours after wrapping up a conference on the ACA litigation. As the Los Angeles Times observed, if the Judicial Code of Conduct actually applied to the nine justices on the Supreme Court, the two guests of honor might have been in violation of the provision that says, “A judge may attend fund-raising events of law-related and other organizations although the judge may not be a speaker, a guest of honor, or featured on the program of such an event.”
 
I will say once again that I don’t think this one dinner means Scalia and Thomas should be bounced off the ACA case, or that the justices should hide in court broom closets and avoid public appearances. But their utter disregard for the fact that the ethics rules would prohibit such activity is worrisome. Not for them, or the future of the ACA. But for the court and the growing public sense that it’s comprised of two opposing teams and a funny little utility outfielder named Kennedy.

 

[ekg]

all you can do at this point is shake your head and walk away because there simply isn't any intelligent disagreement to be had with those kinds of people..

it would be more intellectually stimulating, not to mention cleaner, flinging your poo at a zoo monkey..