Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele should have realized he stepped in it when the National Review advised him to “try thinking before you speak,” referring to Steele’s opening salvo following President Obama’s nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. Steele released a statement criticizing Kagan for her support of Justice Thurgood Marshall’s speech in which he said that the Constitution as originally conceived and drafted was “defective.”

Had Mr. Steele taken the time to look into the context of Justice Marshall’s statement he might have found that Marshall was referring to the Three-Fifths compromise in Article 1 Section 2, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person. I don’t know about Mr’ Steele, but I would call that a serious “defect.”

Justice Marshall also said the it took several constitutional amendments and a Civil War to right this wrong. Again, had Chairman Steele taken the time to look at the copy of the Constitution I’m sure he carries in his pocket he could have read the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to find out the Marshall was correct. I assume Steele has heard of the Civil War, but maybe I take too much for granted.

But as is their habit, once the RNC had the shovel in their hands, they kept digging. Doug Heye posted this at gop.com:

“In the same law review article, Kagan endorses the view that the Court’s primary role is to “show special solicitude” for people a judge has empathy for.

In the article about her former boss, Justice Thurgood Marshall, Kagan wrote:

For in Justice Marshall’s view, constitutional interpretation demanded, above all else, one thing from the courts: it demanded that the courts show a special solicitude for the despised and disadvantaged.  It was the role of the courts, in interpreting the Constitution, to protect the people who went unprotected by every other organ of government — to safeguard the interests of people who had no other champion.

The majority of Americans want a justice who understands that the Founders intended the Court to serve as a neutral arbiter of disputes.  The question for Kagan is whether she believes in a ‘modern Constitution’ shaped by activist judges pursuing personal political agendas or whether she believes in basing judicial decisions based on the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Would that include “activist judges” like the majority on the Roberts Court who overturned more than a hundred years of legal precedent and greatly expanded the parameters of the case to “pursue their personal political agenda” by granting corporations the rights of individuals in Citizens United v. FEC? Those kind of “activist judges?”