Thurgood Marshall Was Wrong: Michael Steele Slams Kagan as Supreme Court Nominee

Michael, Michael, Michael. It's like he is a glutton for punishment. Either that or he has a press secretary who is secretly trying to destroy his career. In true Michael Steele style, he has released a nonsensical statement this morning opposing President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, dean of the Harvard law school. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against anyone's politics. I feel reasonable minds can disagree on a number of policies and ideas about how to achieve the same goal. With Steele, though, what I'm missing is the reasonable mind part.

Steele's statement reads:

"Over the past year, the American people have been witness to President Obama's massive expansion of the federal government in to our daily lives. To assure the American people, President Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, will need to demonstrate that she is committed to upholding the vision of our founding fathers, who wrote a Constitution meant to limit the power of government, not expand it. The president has stated repeatedly that he wants a justice who will understand the effects of decisions on the lives of everyday Americans. But what Americans want is a justice who will stay true to the Constitution and defend the rights of all Americans, adhering to the rule of law instead of legislating from the bench. Given Kagan's opposition to allowing military recruiters access to her law school's campus, her endorsement of the liberal agenda and her support for statements suggesting that the Constitution "as originally drafted and conceived, was "defective," you can expect Senate Republicans to respectfully raise serious and tough questions to ensure the American people can thoroughly and thoughtfully examine Kagan's qualifications and legal philosophy before she is confirmed to a lifetime appointment." (Source: Republican National Committee)

For those of you who have been too busy watching LisaRaye's reality show or planting sh*t in Farmville to stay up on things, Kagan was the former law clerk of Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court justice who once famously used the word "defective" to refer to the government devised by America's 18th-century founders in a 1987 speech commemorating the bicentennial of the Constitution. In particular, Marshall discussed the Constitution's deliberate omission of equal rights for women and black slaves.

Marshall added that the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government ,and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite the Constitution, they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.

Apparently, Kagan's agreement and support of Marshall's statements offend Steele's sensibilities, because he would have no doubt preferred to remain a slave.

Additionally, in another perversion of facts, Steele objects to Kagan's refusal to allow military recruiters on her law school campus. What he doesn't say is that her objection was based on her opposition to the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, which she felt was discriminatory.

Dozens of law schools supported barring JAG recruiters, including Yale, Stanford, Harvard and my alma mater, Georgetown Law, because of DADT. Law schools did this not because they hate America and Jesus, but because they did not support a policy that prevented men and women from fighting for their country simply based on sexual orientation.

Steele's injection of misinformation with a splash of lunacy is truly a detriment to intelligent debate in this country.

Whether one agrees with Kagan's nomination is really not the point. Steele's implication that discrimination on the basis of sexuality is not problematic and that the Constitution was NOT defective as it was originally "drafted and conceived" is the real story here.

But I guess on some level it makes sense: If it were left up to him, he would still be three-fifths of a man, which would match his three-fifths of a brain.

Contrary to the foolishness of Steele, watch President Obama introduce Kagan to the world: