As confirmation hearings opened Monday afternoon, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee took the unusual approach of attacking Kagan because she admired the late justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she clerked more than two decades ago.

“Justice Marshall’s judicial philosophy,” said Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, “is not what I would consider to be mainstream.” Kyl — the lone member of the panel in shirtsleeves for the big event — was ready for a scrap. Marshall “might be the epitome of a results-oriented judge,” he said. [...]

Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the panel, branded Marshall a “well-known activist.” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Marshall’s legal view “does not comport with the proper role of a judge or judicial method.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) pronounced Marshall “a judicial activist” with a “judicial philosophy that concerns me.”

This isn’t the first time Republicans have attacked Kagan for her praise and admiration for the late justice; shortly after her nomination, RNC chairman Michael Steele blasted Kagan for her ties to Marshall:

RNC Chairman Michael Steele targeted her praise for the jurisprudence of Marshall, a liberal icon, and a speech in which Marshall called the Constitution “defective.” [...]

“Given Kagan’s opposition to allowing military recruiters access to her law school’s campus, her endorsement of the liberal agenda and her support for statements suggesting that the Constitution ‘as originally drafted and conceived,’ was ‘defective,’ you can expect Senate Republicans to respectfully raise serious and tough questions to ensure the American people can thoroughly and thoughtfully examine Kagan’s qualifications and legal philosophy before she is confirmed to a lifetime appointment,” Steele said in the statement.

As for yesterday’s hearing, TPM’s Christina Bellantoni kept a tally, and found that Republicans mentioned Marshall a whopping 35 times. At the Washington Monthly, Steve Benen sees this as evidence of a coordinated attack on Justice Marshall’s views, and marvels at the spectacle of GOP senators ”condemning one of the most venerated Supreme Court justices in American history.”

For my part, I’m not too surprised to see Republicans target Thurgood Marshall for attack; not only was he one of the most liberal justices in Supreme Court history, but his tenure on the Supreme Court was relatively recent. Indeed, some longer-serving GOP senators are old enough to have railed against Marshall for “activist judging” in the 1980s or early 1990s, before he died. And while liberals might find conservative attacks on Marshall offensive, it’s worth noting that they’ve focused their fire on his theory of jurisprudence and not his work for the NAACP. The former is untoward; the latter, genuinely objectionable.

A C-SPAN-commissioned poll released today shows just 19 percent of people surveyed could name Kagan as the nominee. That figure may appear unsurprising, given that a Findlaw.com poll from earlier this month found that only 35 percent of people could name even one of the current justices. However, a similar C-SPAN poll conducted just prior to Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings showed a far higher percentage — 43 percent — could then name her as the nominee.

C-SPAN did not speculate in its press release on why Kagan’s name recognition is so much lower than Sotomayor’s was at this point in the confirmation process. I will only venture to guess that a major factor here is that Sotomayor got a great deal of media attention for being the first Hispanic Supreme Court nominee.

Recent polls show generally tepid support for Kagan. In C-SPAN’s poll, 38 percent of respondents supported her, 30 percent didn’t and 33 percent didn’t have an opinion. Kagan’s rating was higher in a USA Today/Gallup poll from earlier his month, giving her an approval spread of 46-32 percent. Rasmussen Reports released a poll yesterday that gave her a negative approval rating — 35 percent thought she should be confirmed, while 42 percent did not.

Updated at 4:15 p.m.

Sotomayor didn’t intend to make a public announcement about this: she made the comments privately at a Yale Law School 30th reunion event, which she asked that reporters not be allowed to attend. State Sen. Ed Meyer, however, who also attended the event, told a reporter for the New Haven Register that Sotomayor “gave the most astounding account of how the president selected her,” talked about shopping for clothes to wear to the acceptance ceremony, and reported how government officials instead told her to bring five suits. They would tell her which one she should wear.

She also tossed in this tidbit of information sure to interest anyone following the contentious Sotomayor nomination:  The controversial reverse discrimination case Sotomayor participated in as an appellate court judge, Ricci v. DeStefano, may not be decided in June, as had been widely expected.  Instead, the case, “one can safely predict, will be among the last to come out before the term ends,” said Ginsburg.

To be sure, that doesn’t tell us much. Although the term officially ends in late September, the court has been expected to issue its decisions by the end of June, before the court takes off for its summer recess, because Souter made clear he’s not staying past the end of this term. A new justice needs to be confirmed, move to Washington and hire new law clerks to be prepared to begin hearing cases in early October.

Some Republicans, however, have argued that they need more time to review Sotomayor’s voluminous record of court decisions — though many Democrats speculate that they really just want to wait for the court to decide the Ricci case, in the hopes of a reversal that they’ll then use against her.

The characteristically careful wording of Ginsburg’s statement hasn’t stopped the speculation that something nefarious is going on, though. Already, Sotomayor opponents are seizing on Ginsburg’s comment to resume the argument to delay Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings until September. They’re currently scheduled to begin July 13.

As William Jacobson, at Legal Insurrection, writes:

I have suspected that one of the reasons the Obama administration wants to rush the Sotomayor confirmation hearings through in mid-July is to avoid the serious political damage to Sotomayor’s confirmation of a reversal on Ricci. Ginsburg’s statements seem to support this wisdom, from the Obama administration’s point of view, since the Ricci decision appears to be headed for release after mid-July. [added] Normally the Court would render its decisions by the end of June, which makes it curious that Ginsburg would emphasize that the Ricci decision would be one of the last decisions released. We’ll see in the next couple of weeks whether the Ricci decision takes place on the normal timetable.

Ginsburg’s statements should give everyone pause as to the timing of the confirmation hearings. The possibility of a reversal on Ricci being held back (whether intentionally or not) until after the confirmation hearings argues for a September confirmation schedule.

Uh oh. It looks like GOP Senators may make an issue out of the fact that they were kept out of the loop on today’s announcement of the date of the Sonia Sotomayor hearings. … We may be hearing GOP Senators complaining about this soon enough.

Was there a serious chance that Republicans wouldn’t complain about the timing of the hearings? They’d been for delaying the hearings to Labor Day; meanwhile, their allies outside of Congress were threatening a three-month drumbeat of attacks on Sotomayor as a hot-headed racist. It might have been a blunder for Democrats not to tell Republicans immediately of their plans, but I’d hate to be the pollster tasked with making the average voter care whether Sen. Jeff Sessons (R-Ala.) had his feelings hurt.

Referring to former Bush administration OLC attorney John Yoo’s “torture memo” that defined torture in only the most extreme terms and still didn’t ban it, she said: “I have written very critically of that opinion … my view is that that opinion was not written in the best traditions of the office and did not reflect that principle that legal advice should be impartial, independent, principled and accurate.”

Johnson also confirmed that she would not interfere with the release of the Office of Professional Responsibility report about the integrity and competence of previous OLC opinions, which did approve presidential authority to violate congressional statutes.

Though not discussed in the mainstream media nearly as much as the nomination of Attorney General Eric Holder, the confirmation hearing of Kagan and Associate Attorney General-nominee Tom Perrelli was eagerly anticipated in the legal world, and with good reason. Besides likely becoming the first female solicitor general, Kagan — who for the last few years has been the dean of Harvard Law School — has been on just about everyone’s short-list as a possible appointment to the Supreme Court. After the news of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s battle with pancreatic cancer came to light last week, the legal blogosphere lit up with talk about Kagan’s potential sooner-than-expected ascent to the bench.

That’s something the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were undoubtedly aware of while they questioned Kagan and Perrelli. While some of the minority members, particularly Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), quibbled briefly over Kagan’s lack of experience as a litigator, most seemed in awe of her reputation as not only an incredible legal mind, but also at her heralded skill at brokering discussion between partisan parties.

While Perrelli received his share of questions, the committee’s attention seemed to rest squarely on Kagan. She joked with Arlen Specter (R-Penn.), the committee’s ranking Republican, over some or her past legal writing — going so far as to call one of her own memos “the dumbest thing I’ve ever read,” and saying that the position of Solicitor General, which is sometimes called the “10th seat on the Supreme Court,” is more like being the “37th clerk.”  Both Kagan and Perrelli, like Holder before them, emphasized their commitment to running the Justice Department without politics and righting the course from the last eight years.

Both Kagan and Perrelli still need to respond to some of the senators’ questions in writing, so a committee vote to send the nominations to the full Senate is not expected until sometime next week. The hearing lasted slightly more than two hours — and if speed is an indicator of the committee’s prerogative on these nominees, things are looking very good for the Obama administration.

From The Times:

Mr. Geithner, departing from prepared remarks, said the nonpayment of payroll taxes in the three years he was at the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2004 “were careless mistakes, they were avoidable mistakes. But they were unintentional. I should have been more careful.” He apologized that the committee had to spend so much time on his taxes when so much more serious issues are before it and the country. Disclosure of the tax problems last week caused Mr. Geithner’s confirmation hearing to be delayed a week, past Mr. Obama’s inauguration.

With the banking system in a free fall, lawmakers have little choice. Besides, Republicans like Geithner, and non-payment of taxes probably isn’t the greatest sin, as far as many of them are concerned. Senators from both parties lobbed a few questions at Geithner over the tax problems – he used Turbo Tax, in case you are wondering –  but also said publicly that he’ll be confirmed soon, according The Times.

So soon it will be on to bigger matters for Geithner. Like stabilizing the financial system, stopping foreclosures, getting credit moving again, fixing the housing market’s woes, deciding whether to prop up ailing banks …

Ordinary taxpayers would like an answer to this question: Why have they been billed more than $45 billion to rescue Citigroup from failure when, as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, you were its primary supervisor? Three major problems led to Citigroup’s downfall: bad investment policy; overexpansion, which overwhelmed Citigroup’s management; and an inadequate capital base. Why was Citigroup’s supervision inadequate to deal with these problems?

Here’s another:

How do we more effectively regulate the financial services industry without adding unnecessary regulations that cripple our ability to compete globally?

I’d like Geithner to lay out honestly, and in clear terms, exactly how bad the mess we’re in has gotten – and how scared we should be. Judging by Wall Street’s reaction on Tuesday to mounting bank troubles, this is a crisis that’s getting worse by the day. To earn the trust of Americans, Geithner needs to go on the record here, and begin offering the kind of transparency that has previously been missing.

Anticipating the minority’s objections, Warner stressed Holder’s learned from past “misjudgments” and discussed his ample experience, mentioning his appointment by former President Ronald Reagan as a district court judge.

It’s important to note that no Republicans have said they will oppose Holder’s confirmation, but have said he’ll face “tough” questioning.  We’ll see how tough it is, but judging from the weak list of minority witnesses, it’s questionable how strong the opposition will be.