Kagan and the benefits of incompetence

Roger Kimball writes of Pres. Obama's incompetence (Hat tip: Instapundit):

The man can pose. He can preen. He cannot, judging by his performance these last eighteen months, govern. His handling, which is to say his ostentatious mishandling of the BP oil spill, is only the latest evidence that he is wildly out of his depth.

It is not surprising then to find evidence accumulating that Obama's pick for the Supreme Court is incompetent as a lawyer. Power Line reports that, in her efforts at Harvard to discriminate against the military, Elena Kagan signed on to a brief that not even one member of the Supreme Court could agree with:

Kagan signed in the Solomon Amendment case argued that law schools didn't violate the Solomon Amendment because they treated the military the same as they did other employers. It was an argument confined to the statutory language of the amendment. The Supreme Court blew it off in the first few pages of its analysis.

At Volockh Conspiracy, Stewart Baker reviews the incompetence of another brief filed by her office (Hat tip: Instapundit).

What does all this say about Elena Kagan, woman of mystery and Solicitor General until two weeks ago? Nothing good, I fear. The brief is at best a hacked-together, please-no-one compromise. At worst it borders on the unprofessional.

What does it mean to have such a person on the Supreme Court? While undoubtedly a reliable vote for the left, she appears unable to form a coherent argument. Consequently, decisions that she writes are unlikely to have lasting influence. Since Pres. Obama is sure to nominate leftists to the Supreme Court, the best we can hope for is an incompetent and, therefore, ineffective leftist. Elena Kagan seems to fit the bill.


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