Following Elena Kagan's nomination for the Supreme Court, Fox News quickly adopted a line of attack: They declared her unqualified on the basis of not having served as a judge. “This woman has no judicial experience” claimed Gretchen Carlson. “So just what makes Elena Kagan qualified?” Bill Hemmer chimed in, asking, “She has no judicial experience, how do you become a Supreme Court justice if that's the case?” And so it went, right down the line, with Fox Nation, FoxNews.com, and Michelle Malkin echoing the claim.

This didn't make a lot of sense at the time. More than three dozen Supreme Court justices had no prior judicial experience at the time they were first nominated, including two of the past four chief justices, eight of the 17 chief justices in history, and seven of the nine justices who decided Brown v. Board of Education. Moreover, Kagan's legal experience is comparable to that of conservative justices William Rehnquist, Clarence Thomas, and John Roberts at the time of their nomination. Indeed, numerous conservatives, legal experts, and journalists have agreed that Kagan is qualified.

But now, a source with unimpeachable conservative legal credentials has weighed in with a statement that really should slam the door on this talking point. During a speech this evening, Justice Antonin Scalia reportedly said that he was “happy to see that this latest nominee” is “not a judge at all”:

“When I first came to the Supreme Court, three of my colleagues had never been a federal judge,” said Scalia who joined the Court in 1986 after being nominated by President Reagan. “William Rehnquist came to the Bench from the Office of Legal Counsel. Byron White was Deputy Attorney General. And Lewis Powell who was a private lawyer in Richmond and had been president of the American Bar Association.”

“Currently, there is nobody on the Court who has not served as a judge -- indeed, as a federal judge -- all nine of us,” he continued. ". . . I am happy to see that this latest nominee is not a federal judge -- and not a judge at all."

Seems like Fox News needs to find itself a new attack.