The nomination of Solicitor General Kagan to the Supreme Court offers lots of grounds for criticism, but her praise for Justice Thurgood Marshall isn’t one of them. At least not in this newspaper’s view. Yet General Kagan was attacked for her remarks echoing the justice for whom she once clerked — particularly his statements, on the 200^th anniversary of the Constitution, that the document as originally drafted was defective. Marshall’s original remarks were so clearly directed at the failure of the Founders to defeat slavery and at their compromises countenancing its continuance in the new republic that it’s hard to imagine what the chairman of the Republican Party, Michael Steele, was thinking in going after Ms. Kagan on this head. She will be open to criticism on other matters, and there will be plenty of time for these columns to articulate some of it. But her association with Thurgood Marshall is one of the most distinguished features of her career. These columns revere him for his pioneering role in the civil rights struggle, the emblematic nature of his triumph before the bench, and his good humor through thick and thin. When a federal courthouse was named for him in New York, we wrote about it in an editorial called Thurgood Marshall Courthouse, in which we remarked that “All New Yorkers, of all races, can be proud to have a courthouse named after him” — precisely, we would add at this juncture, because from time to time he spoke out about the defects that so clearly did hobble our fundamental law in the early decades of American independence.