With CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey’s recent attempt to revive the Elena-Kagan-should-recuse bandwagon, you had to know that a column restating it would soon follow. And it did. Let’s just skip to the summary of Jeffrey’s Oct. 19 column:
Five months before Obama nominated Kagan to the Court, Kagan assigned her top deputy to do work that made him a “legal adviser” on the anticipated Obamacare cases. That deputy went on to argue some of those cases in federal court.
Can Kagan’s impartiality in these cases be reasonable [sic] questioned? It would be unreasonable not to.
That’s all Jeffrey has — that then-solicitor general Kagan appointed someone else to handle health care reform. After all, those emails Jeffrey has been obsessing over for months offer no evidence whatsoever that Kagan was otherwise involved in forming a legal strategy over challenges to health care reform. So Jeffrey must invent a conflict.
Needless to say, Jeffrey does not mention the much more obvious conflict-of-interest issues regarding Clarence Thomas, whose wife is a a right-wing activist who has attacked health care reform as unconstitutional. Thomas also failed to disclose his wife’s income from activist groups for several years.