Supreme Court nomination hearings are usually pretty boring and ridiculous or Kagan herself once called them “farce.” But yesterday Kagan herself turned in one of the most laugh-line rich performances in recent history. This morning we look at Kagan’s top five jokes and laugh lines from yesterday’s hearings.

Senator Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island with experience as his State’s Attorney General and as the United States Attorney for Rhode Island as well, uses his questioning of Elena Kagan to launch a tough attack on the current Supreme Court.

His contention: Justices “with a particular mission and are selectively knocking out precedent that does not coincide with their ideological views.” Read More

Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat who headed the prosecutor’s office in Minneapolis before coming to the Senate, turns to another line of criticism against conservative legal ideology: the claim that Justices are like umpires, whose job is simply “call balls and strikes” (a metaphor that Chief Justice Roberts suggested during his confirmation hearing).

She asks Kagan whether the metaphor fits. Kagan says it does in some ways, but it doesn’t in others. Read More

Even on the worst hypothesis of the facts for Kos, it’s a little hard for me to imagine any scenario where he ends up doing jail time over the controversy that erupted yesterday over his charges that his former pollster Del Ali had fabricated polling data. But that seems to be what Ali is suggesting or threatening in his latest attack on Kos. Whatever happens, it sounds like this is going to continue to heat up.

Democratic Senators continue their critique by focusing on what they believe to be the Court’s lack of proper deference to Congress. The argument is that members of the Court are substituting their policy preferences for Congress’s decisions, and doing so by ignoring or rejecting determinations made by Congress when it enacts legislation.

They focus on two issues. Read More

Yesterday afternoon we briefly had a poll included in our Obama Approval dataset on TPMPollTracker. So I wanted to take a moment to explain how it got in and why it was removed. Read More

Moving into the second round of questions, Senator Sessions focuses again on legal controversies relating to the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy.

He begins by saying that he was disappointed with Kagan’s testimony yesterday regarding military recruiting at Harvard Law Schoo. Read More

Senate Republicans are so opposed to financial reform that they voted last night to continue the TARP bailout program.

The five big hot button questions that never got asked in yesterday’s Kagan hearings. You might be surprised.

One of the interesting aspects of a confirmation hearing is that it provides some insight into which constitutional issues a Senator finds important–or at least sufficiently important to justify a discussion with the nominee during the course of the hearing. Of course, the choreography of these discussions is always the same: the Senator raises an issue, the nominee recites the governing legal standard but says that she can’t address specific issues that might come before the Court, and the Senator moves on to the next issue. So we don’t learn much about the nominee (other than whether she has a broad knowledge of general constitutional law principles) but we do learn something about the Senator.

The list so far has been extensive. Read More