Even as the Supreme Court was on the verge of announcing its decision on the constitutionality of health care reform, one ConWeb outlet was still trying to beat the dead horse of trying to get Elena Kagan to recuse from deliberating on it. Surprisingly, it’s not CNSNews.com.
In a June 25 WorldNetDaily article, Unruh uncritically repeated a claim from right-wing legal group Judicial Watch that “A huge cloud looms over the coming U.S. Supreme Court decision on Barack Obama’s health-care law” because “Elena Kagan served in the Obama administration when the law advanced through Congress and now is on the Supreme Court bench sitting in judgment of it.”
Unruh writes:
Email exchanges previously made public reveal that during Kagan’s time as solicitor general, her office helped develop a strategy to defend Obamacare legally.
Ordinary judicial ethics would mandate that if she participated in such discussions, she should not later sit in judgment of the law, Judicial Watch has argued.
In fact, as we’ve detailed, it has been made clear that Kagan appointed others to develop that strategy and she was walled off from those deliberations.
As with CNS’ Terry Jeffrey, Unruh was silent about Justice Clarence Thomas’ apparent conflict of interest — his wife is a right-wing activist who founded a group that has attacked health care reform — that would also theoretically demand recusal.