By Howard Kurtz
After a lengthy, smiling pause, Sarah Palin could not name a Supreme Court decision she disagrees with, beyond Roe v. Wade, in an interview that aired tonight on CBS.
The Alaska governor had just finished explaining that abortion should be decided by individual states when CBS anchor Katie Couric asked, “What other Supreme Court decisions do you disagree with?”
“Well, let’s see,” Palin said, stalling for time. “There’s, of course — in the great history of America rulings, there have been rulings, that’s never going to be absolute consensus by every American. And there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So, you know, going through the history of America, there would be, there would be others but…”
Asked again if she could think of any, Palin answered without naming a ruling or even subject area on which she would challenge the high court.
One puzzling aspect of Palin’s non-response is that she was heavily involved in one of the court’s biggest cases, a decision three months ago to slash the punitive damages awarded to those whose livelihoods were affected by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound. The court ended nearly two decades of legal battles by cutting the award from $2.5 billion to $500 million.
Palin sided with the nearly 33,000 fishermen, native Alaskans and others who sued because of the accident — although she and her husband dropped out because of his commercial fishing business — and she denounced the court ruling afterward. But she made no mention of the case in the interview.
