She's 61, has no judicial experience and hasn't practiced law in nearly two decades.  Why can't people accept that putting Hillary on the Supreme Court is a terrible, terrible idea?

The idea that Obama needs "star power" in his Secretary of State is almost as preposterous as the proposition that Hillary is even remotely qualified for the post. The only thing she's ever run, her primary campaign, was a screaming disaster. God only knows what kind of chaos she would bring to our already severely wounded foreign policy.

What Obama needs at State is a pair of competent, experienced hands so he can devote most of his attention to domestic concerns initially. HOLBROOKE.

Now that the campaign is over, is there room to discuss substance?

What would HRC bring to the State Department?  Has her experience with foreign affairs and diplomacy grown beyond the bringing-peace-to-Ireland and ducking-fire-in-Bosnia levels that were ridiculed during the primary campaign?  What managerial experience qualifies her to run, even through a Deputy Secretary, a Cabinet-level department with more than 12,000 employees?  And if she has no serious foreign policy experience, and no administrative experience, what does she bring to the job other than assuaging the lingering resentment of her supporters--most of whom, on the evidence of the election, have long since gotten over it--and feeding the "team of rivals" story line?

Just as well it's not a parlimentary system. Could you imagine a PM Obama having to deal with a Hillary/Hesiltine problem?

1. I've heard several people make the assertion, but why exactlywould Hillary be unfirable?

2. What FWright said.

No way on the Bupreme Bourt.  She's bot bualified.  She's neither a begal bacademic nor a bong-berving bederal bappeals bourt budge.  It's important that the job go not just to a relative liberal -- that is one who does not share the rigid conservative judicial philosophy of Scalia and Thomas -- but to someone with the bintellectual bops.  The Bupreme Bourt makes very important bolicy becisions that are followed forevermore by all the bourts in the band and are exceedingly difficult to bundo.

For once, I agree with Robert Powell.  Except for the last word.  I have to think that Obama has some smart friends and colleagues that, though less well known, would be very competent in the post (and in other posts, as well).  I would like to see and hear from more of them. Being a democrat, I don't have any objection to academics, and I think it would be great to see him appoint some of the better ones.

First, it seems some commenters are undervaluing the significance of the gravitas of the name Clinton and what it means to diplomatic relations. At the very least, it should allow him to capitalize on the goodwill Bill established between America and the rest of the world going forward. If they play their cards right, they might even be able to simply negate much of the degradation which has occurred during the Bush Regime.

Second, it seems to me that the qualifications for SoS revolve around interpersonal skills and policy. As such, much of that for which she has been derided by myself and others for the last 24 months is a non-issue as SoS. However, her interpersonal skills, wielded with brutal efficiency during her primary campaign IIRC, will be critical in this role. And sharing many of the same goals as Obama not only does not hurt, but being familiar with and have ideas and plans geared towards achieving these goals at the outset should help signficantly.

"No way on the Supreme Court.  She's not qualified.  She's neither a legal academic nor a long-serving federal appeals court judge."

Can you guess the total number of years of federal judicial experience of John Marshall, Joseph Story, Benjamin Cardozo, Louis Brandeis, H.F. Stone, Hugo Black, Robert Jackson, W.O. Douglas, William Brennan, J.M. Harlan II, Byron White, and Earl Warren prior to their elevations to the Supreme Court?

The answer is one.  Harlan spent a single year on the 2nd Circuit.  And the only men on this list to have made any mark as academics were Stone and Douglas (and that's not what got either of them on the court -- one was U.S. attorney general and the other had headed the SEC). Cardozo and Brennan were distinguished state judges, but the rest of the guys on this list were practicing lawyers and/or politicians prior to joining the court and had zero judicial experience.

Anyhow, I have no real opinion on Clinton's SCOTUS qualifications.  But the idea that a Supreme Court justice needs to be a legal academic or long-serving circuit judge strikes me as nuts.

I don't buy the notion that what we need at state is star power.  Obama can walk and chew gum at the same time, and he'll have to as President.  You can't just do one half of the job and hand the other half off to your Secretary of State, even if your Secretary of State happens to be famous.

This is a no-lose for Barack. If she accepts, he has her on his leash. No one believes State and State alone will ever have the clout it had in the past. His inside team will be the best clue to how he plans to use the military and diplomacy. Yeah, she knows that...

Will she be the most effective person for the position? She has the potential and it is in her interest to make it so. Obama didn't make many poor choices since he declared and his team didn't appear to be staffed by winners 18 months ago. I seriously doubt his circle believes this will doom him.

But she won't get a shot at SCOTUS by snubbing him. This is a current opening, it would be unwise to stiff him and hope she gets the call if a justice leaves.

It isn't as though she can turn it down and hope to appear as still being owed anything for her support. Accept or decline, they're even. More than likely, she'd be watching from the outside and before '12 the Obama foreign policy will appear as something she'll regret not having on her 'did it list'.

But the longer she waits, the harder it is to turn him down. Face it, we give people some time to say 'yes'. When the answer is 'no' we expect that in private or in 48 hours. He has another name or three on deck and they'll agree the day after she takes a pass.

This is like the Iraq War for me - I agree with EVERYone.

I think no matter what happens with this pick, its a win-win for Obama.  

If she decides on her own to keep her independence, then he's shown her the respect millions think she deserves (internationally as well as nationally, GSpinks is right - no matter what you may think of either of them, there is no question that the word "Clinton" is very compelling out there) AND he's resurrected her star power and stature a bit rigtht when he'll need both to get his domestic agenda - very ambitious and very necessary - passed.  

He'll have tamed her a bit more. She needed this and he knows it. It's already worked in that way, despite the predictable Clinton circus that always goes along with them.  No one even cares anymore about that.  Her stature has gone up after the beating it took after her ridiculous campaign,

If she does take it, then I have to say I think she'll be terrific - even though I know there's a good case against this thought.  In my gut, I still think she'll be just great at it.

as for SCOTUS and Hil:  don't forget that Sandra Day O'Connor's pragmatic experience as an elected AZ State legislator is often cited as a missing element on the current court.

And to the notion that you must be a sitting US Federal judge to be qualified, for you Catholics out there (lapsed or otherwise) remember that you don't have to be a priest to be Pope either, just a cardinal (and you don't have to be a priest to be appointed cardinal).  Maybe something we shoudl consider in teh future

I have a friend who is an old precinct boss in Pennsylvania who has known the Clintons for 20 years - he said there is no way Hillary wants anything to do with the Supreme Court, she'd be bored to death.  For better or worse, both Bill and Hill love electoral politics - are total addicts - and aren't interested in anything else.

Saying that other Supreme Court justices have also lacked judicial experience isn't a good enough argument for Hillary Clinton to be on the Supreme Court. There would need to be some POSITIVE argument for why she should be 1 of the 9 people whose interpretation of the Constitution is binding on the entire country.

Yes, she's intelligent and went to Yale Law School. That's nice. But it's not nearly enough on its own.

Is there any evidence whatsoever that she's done any serious thinking about the issues that Supreme Court justices have to decide?

andro and mj, re the Supreme Court:

Good point, andro, re past Supreme Court judges.  However, my preferred qualifications are not nuts, they're not very hard to meet, and I don't see why we shouldn't impose them, at least as a serious aspiration, going forward.  People in those positions -- federal (in some cases, state) appellate court judge or a wide-ranging legal scholar -- are the people who have spent the most time engaged with just the issues that the court will deal with and are best equipped, intellectually, to develop federal law.  It's what they've spent much of their careers already thinking about and/or doing.  The life of a Supreme Court judge is largely a life of the mind.  You have to deal with your colleagues, you have some administrative duties, you have to lead a small group of clerks, and you have to be ready to deal with a small area of recurring emergency situations (basically death penalty cases and stopping recounts).  Otherwise, this job is about sitting in your office being nerdy.  If the life is one of the mind, I want to make sure it's a life of the good mind.  Frankly, there are much smarter folks out there than your typical Supreme Court judge who would have made and would make much better law.

I'm not sure we've ever had a legal academic -- not a judge -- on the Supreme Court.  I think we ought to consider it.  A name that I've been thinking about quite a bit lately is Cass Sunstein.  Another person I've been thinking about, who is a federal appellate court judge, is Diane Wood.  Both happened to teach at the University of Chicago Law School when Barack Obama taught there and when (confession time) I went there as a student.  They are both very smart and sensible in the right ways.  So I happen to know them, and so does Obama.  I'm sure there are many others out there who fit my qualifications and would make excellent choices whom neither I nor Obama happen to know.

One thing I'm pretty sure of is that this is not a job where one can rest on one's Malcolm Gladwell-esque imponderables.  Although everyone, intellectuals included, make decisions early based on their attitudes that are hard to reverse, this job actually requires you to justify your decision in something like a scholarly paper which will henceforth be used to determine what the law means, including the meaning of the Constitution and the limits on government power.  So, not much rides on the choice, other than the definition of liberty, equality, and justice.  I'd prefer someone who has had at least some history of engaging with these legal issues as legal issues, the more the better, (provided that their conclusions don't suck of course) and Hillary Clinton just doesn't have that history at all, as far as I know.

I'm not quite sure what the relevance of having been a politician might be other than that you would know how your prior constituency -- say, Arizonans -- might react to this or that decision.  How is that relevant?  Does it mean that you have a greater appreciation for the plight of ordinary people?  Maybe, maybe not.  Being a politician doesn't mean you care about poor people or struggling people.  My guess is that the ranks of academia have greater numbers of people who would fit that mold than that of politicians.  Does it mean that you have a greater sense of what this or that decision will mean, pragmatically?  Maybe, maybe not.  You're not really supposed to decide cases based on whether your decision will be popular, of course, although it is certainly a good idea to have a sense of both the reality behind a given litigation and the reality of what a given decision will mean in the world.  If anything, it might help you write better decisions.  But academics and judges are often in touch with reality too, and, in the case of academics anyway, in a more systematic and rigorous way that goes beyond the anecdotal.  In any event, you can easily find people who are both grounded and meet my criteria.

she didn't see obama coming during primaries, she had a bad team, she was arrogant and didn't plan beyond the first stages. this is not star power, third world where the next foreign policy will be played is not a swing state. no hillary for state, no way

The myth of Hillary's "competence" persists despite all evidence to the contrary.  She is a bad choice for any critical job because she has NEVER demonstrated the ability to do any critical job.  Her record is one of failure.  Not to mention that, with her continuing presidential ambitions, she will never be appropriately subordinate to Obama's policies and agenda.  Bad idea.  The only place for Hillary is where she can do the least harm.  I would have made here Attorney General for that reason.  Or just leave her right there in the Senate where she has done nothing and will continue to do nothing.  Maybe she will resign because she never wanted to be a senator in the first place.  it was merely a stepping stone.  New York, and for sure the NYS Democratic party, would be better off without her.

jhildner,

Felix Frankfurter for one.  And his bio says he was involved with the founding of The New Republic.