The Dithering of a District Diva

NPR: Justice Scalia “likes” Kagan, her Citizens United argument. From a December 22, 2009 NPR article:

<blockquote>[Kagan] knew she likely had a losing hand, and was grim about it in private. But when she faced the court, she cheerfully sparred with the justices, seeming to relish the experience and bluntly telling them that over the past century, the court had never before questioned the ban on corporate spending for candidate elections.

Justice Antonin Scalia replied that the court may never have questioned the ban, but it had never approved it, either. Congress, he suggested, is too self-interested to be trusted on the matter.

“I doubt that one can expect a body of incumbents to draw election restrictions that do not favor incumbents,” he said, to which Kagan said he was simply “wrong.”

In fact, Kagan said, corporate and union moneys go overwhelmingly to incumbents, so limiting that money, as Congress did in the campaign finance law, “may be the single most self-denying thing that Congress has ever done.”

Scalia likes that kind of push back, and he likes Kagan: “That’s what’s supposed to happen,” he said in an interview. “The reason you ask the question is to see if there’s a decent answer to it.” [emphasis added]</blockquote>