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"  The right-wing chattering asses had a field day yesterday over Elena Kagan&amp;#039;s comment that she doesn&amp;#039;t know what the term &amp;quot;legal progressive&amp;quot; means. Proof, the consensus was, that Kagan is either a fool or a liar \u2014 either way, unfit for a spot on the Supreme Court bench. The asininity of this view is so patent it&amp;#039;s hard to muster the energy to address it. But here goes: The job of Supreme Court justices is to judge the constitutionality of laws. Their rulings either uphold the laws or nullify them. Nullifications, when made, can be made by the liberal side of the bench or by the conservative side. But both represent what the GOP and its allies like to call &amp;quot;judicial activism&amp;quot;: the direct intercedence by the courts in a legislative matter. And so, as Kagan was implying, terms like &amp;quot;progressive&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;conservative&amp;quot; are meaningless: They are totally relative when applied to the justices \u2014 determined entirely by the viewpoint of whoever is using them. To take two recent examples, the supposedly &amp;quot;conservative&amp;quot; rulings this decade on gun rights and eminent domain can easily be seen, respectively, as a radical curtailing of states&amp;#039; rights and a radical expansion of governmental power over private property. Conservative? I&amp;#039;d call them revolutionary. (I&amp;#039;d also like to point out that Peter Bagge, as committed a libertarian and opponent of government overreach as you&amp;#039;ll ever find \u2014 and the best political cartoonist working today \u2014 takes a similar view. Last panel of Page 2 if you&amp;#039;re in a hurry, but this whole piece is worth reading.) What the right wing means to say, of course, in calling Kagan a &amp;quot;progressive,&amp;quot; is simply that she understands her prospective job differently than they do. Broadly speaking, she and other &amp;quot;progressive&amp;quot; legal minds believe that legal conflicts the Constitution does not resolve explicitly must be resolved by the courts, and &amp;quot;conservative&amp;quot; legal minds believe that these situations are rightfully resolved \u2014 or left unresolved \u2014 by the legislature. Fine. I happen to find this view ahistoric and dangerous, but that&amp;#039;s just, like, my opinion, man. I would, though, encourage those who disparage the progressive view to consider the position taken just a few years ago by David Addington, Dick Cheney&amp;#039;s legal honcho, that because the Constitution does not explicitly define the vice president&amp;#039;s role, the vice president is not beholden to constitutional law. Yes, consider that viewpoint \u2014 and watch Addington try to justify it \u2014 and then ask yourselves how you&amp;#039;d feel about a rogue Joe Biden, unleashed and untouchable by the laws of the land. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a7898/elena-kagan-legal-progressive-063010/>