The letter submitted by eight former Solicitors General in support of the Kagan nomination was no surprise. Among other things, anyone who has been Solicitor General is going to be predisposed to see Kagan’s short stint in that position as eminent qualification for the Supreme Court.

I am struck, though, that the three Democratic signatories to the letter—Drew S. Days III, Walter Dellinger, Seth P. Waxman—had the chutzpah to embrace this proposition (emphasis added): “We support the Kagan nomination in the same spirit of fairness and bipartisanship, and deference to presidential appointments of well-qualified individuals to serve on the Supreme Court, that was also due the nominations of then-Judges John G. Roberts, Jr. and Samuel A. Alito, Jr. to serve on the Supreme Court.”

Maybe I’ve somehow missed it, but I haven’t been able to find any letter of support from Days, Dellinger, or Waxman in support of Roberts or Alito. Nor do I recall any of them offering any public support for either nomination. By contrast, I do recall that Dellinger wrote a Washington Post op-ed offering flimsy arguments in support of making public Roberts’s documents from his days in the Office of the Solicitor General. And Days is (and in 2005, I believe, was) a trustee of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, which advised the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005 that Roberts’s record “raises very troubling questions” and which vehemently opposed (and even urged a filibuster of) the Alito nomination.