Did Republican Judiciary Senators Disrespect Thurgood Marshall

It starting to appear that Elena Kagan, Solicitor General of the United States and the pending nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court was right when she complained, in her now-famous 1995 book review, that the Supreme Court confirmation hearings have been reduced to “a vapid and hollow charade, in which repetition of platitudes has replaced discussion of viewpoints.’’

Today is the third day of the confirmation hearings of Kagan, however, it appears to me that Senator Jeff Sessions and other Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are using Kagan's nomination as a mean of indirectly attacking and discrediting the outstanding contributions of the first {and only} African American or Black Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court – Thurgood Marshall.

Kagan, who worked for Marshall when he was nearing 80 year-old has spoken often of her admiration for the justice, calling him "the most important and probably the greatest lawyer of the 20th century."

The late Justice Marshall, a great-grandson of a slaves, was a lawyer who was best remembered for his high success rate in arguing before the Supreme Court and for the victory in Brown v. Board of Education. As general counsel for the NAACP, he was instrumental in disassembling the Supreme Court's racist and unanimous 1954 ruling of "separate but equal." Marshall was nominated to the court by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967. As a child in Baltimore, Marshall was punished for school misbehavior by being forced to write copies of the Constitution, which he later said piqued his interest in the document.