Kennedy don't swing, he says.

... But it's going on all around him ! *

Justice Anthony Kennedy told a Florida audience Friday that he doesn't like being referred to as a swing voter, thank you very much.

"It has to me the imagery of these wild spatial gyrations," he said in a speech Friday at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach. "I don't swing around the cases. They swing around me."

Well let's get that straight, eh?

It was one of the many light moments in a sometimes humorous, sometimes dead-serious speech sponsored by the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches and the Palm Beach County Bar Association, one that touched on the nomination of U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the country's highest court. Kennedy also discussed the nation's overcrowded prison system and the quest for the rule of law in the Third World.

With Kagan's Senate confirmation hearings pending, Kennedy said he hopes senators focus not on questions about how she would vote on one issue or another - a tactic he called a "rather short-term exercise" - but instead on issues of character.

"The idea that you're appointing a judge for a particular result seems to me not right," he said.

If her nomination is approved, he said Kagan would undoubtedly change the makeup of the court.

"It will be a new court," he said. "The dynamic will change."
...

by Andrew Marra, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

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*rimshot*
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