No matter how experienced, moderate or uncontroversial a Supreme Court nominee is, there will always be at least a few Senators and pundits who find something to disagree with. Even Elena Kagan, President Barack Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court and a woman who is, by all accounts, an eminently qualified pick, has been alternately attacked for being too liberal and too conservative, for having too pristine of a resume and for not having any judicial experience.
But the most interesting criticism I've heard came from David Brooks in a column last week in The New York Times. Brooks praised Kagan's intelligence and achievement, but had one major criticism over the course of her distinguished career, Kagan never really took a stand on any important matter. The one controversial position she took was a decision she made as dean of Harvard Law School to ban the military from recruiting at the school's career services facilities, and even then she quickly backed down when the government applied pressure. For someone so smart and so influential, Kagan never did much with her abilities other than advance her own career, according to Brooks.
I don't fully agree with Brooks's perspective if there's any position that is best filled by someone calm, objective and a little boring, it's that of a Supreme Court justice. But underneath his comments lies an interesting trend in our national politics that under President Obama, our government has broken away from the days of government by personality and moved towards a more technocratic form of governance. Instead of an administration run by Huey Longs or Bill Clintons, the old-time politicians with the big egos and booming voices, we have the Obama cabinet, a group that could just as easily be found on a university's faculty as running our country. By my count, five Cabinet members hold doctorates. Several have backgrounds in academia and the private sector, and hooray for us the Ivy League is also well represented.
Nowhere is this reality more evident than on the Supreme Court. If Kagan is confirmed, all nine justices will have a law degree from either Harvard or Yale, and all will have served with distinction within the bureaucracies of the Justice Department, the federal judiciary or academia. Gone are the days when an elected official like Earl Warren or a crusading lawyer like Thurgood Marshall could be expected to earn a seat on the court. Given their resumes, the current justices seem to have been on a pre-Supreme Court track their whole lives.
This rise of the technocracy is a good thing for our country, as our politics could use a little more sobriety, competence and level-headedness. But there are, of course, consequences to this model. For one thing, we may miss out on those candidates who have been so influential in our country's history. As it is now, the confirmation process almost requires a president to pick someone like Elena Kagan, a nominee who is smart and accomplished, but whose life seems to be devoid of risk or creative thought. If this attitude reaches into our electoral politics, we will likely never elect another Lyndon Johnson or Winston Churchill, figures whose skill as leaders and legislators was perhaps matched only by their imperfections as men. There is something to be said for life experience and exposure to the world outside the ivory tower of the university or federal government. For proof of this one only has to look to the administration of John F. Kennedy a group of the nation's "best and brightest" and a group that led the country to the brink of war at the Bay of Pigs and, later, into war in Vietnam.
Given the growing popularity of the Tea Party and other movements, it could be that Obama's technocratic style will leave the White House when he departs from office. But in his appointments to the Supreme Court and through the policies of his administration, we will feel the impact of a government by the brilliant, competent and maybe a little bit sheltered for years to come. It's an interesting experiment, although I hope that in trying it we don't lose sight of the value of the imperfect and the importance of experiences.
