Actually, that is pretty much a requirement for a SC nominee. They need to not show any bias in their answers or they will be accused of pre-judging cases instead of awaiting an actual case with actual facts that they can evaluate. If you look at SC nominee hearings going back for at least the last 25 years you'll see the same sort of dancing around the answers specifically because of that. No nominee worth their salt would come state a position on a hypothetical case that could be used later to attempt to impeach their impartiality.mr.72 wrote:That is a valuable quality for a politician, but thoroughly unacceptable for a Supreme Court justice.Purplehood wrote:She is also exceedingly skilled at avoiding giving an answer to a direct question.
That said, I do have some concerns about her recent ruling that the incorporation of the 2nd Amendment against the states is settled law. I've looked over quite a bit (admittedly, IANAL) of the rulings from the SCOTUS that relate to the 2A, and most of them seem to dodge the issue as completely as they possibly can. The ruling last June in Heller seems to be an exception in that both the ruling and the dissent seemed to agree on the underlying principles behind the 2A (self-defense is one of the rights being protected), but disagree on the ability of states & municipalities to regulate or ban firearms. A large part of the defense that DC used was rooted in the claim that this 2A stuff was all settled law. I thought that the ruling pretty thoroughly slapped that notion down. Also, with different circuits ruling contrary to each other, I think the SCOTUS pretty much HAS to step in and rule conclusively one way or the other on the incorporation issue. The only way I can see this as settled is that the rulings from the 2nd Circuit seem pretty consistently to claim that the 2A doesn't apply to states (some of the other circuits disagree), so I guess from a POV of Stare Decesis, as far as the 2nd Circuit is concerned, it is settled law (despite how much I might disagree with their position).