Nominated by a president whose party controls both houses of Congress, Solicitor General Elena Kagan\u2019s \u201cconfirmation hearings\u201d for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court are largely a formality.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, the nominee\u2019s well-coached insistence on pathetically bland non-answers has been so exasperating — and insulting — that she might as well have placed a video monitor on the witness table, programmed to respond to each question: \u201cI will do my best to be honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring …\u201d and, of course, to \u201cuse resources wisely.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is unfortunate, since — while the hearings have been bland — Ms. Kagan is not, and the American people deserve to know more about the characters to whom President Obama is offering a lifetime seat on the nation\u2019s highest court.<\/p>\n
When the hearings began, ranking Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions offered a devastating opening statement — though it received little press coverage — \u201cdocumenting Kagan\u2019s extreme liberalism,\u201d reports Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe ran through her college thesis that worried about socialism\u2019s demise, and her master\u2019s thesis praising the activism of the Earl Warren court. He noted how she worked for the Michael Dukakis for President campaign, and took a leave as a law school professor to help Joe Biden get liberal Justice Ruth Ginsburg confirmed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet the East Coast media report that a search to determine her political leanings has proved \u201celusive\u201d?<\/p>\n
Nominee Kagan\u2019s statement in her signed brief for the animal cruelty case U.S. v. Stevens that \u201cWhether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs\u201d was and is, as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in rejecting the argument for the high court, \u201cstartling and dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Second Amendment rights, Curt Levy, executive director of the Committee for Justice, reported after reviewing the Clinton Library\u2019s release of Elena Kagan documents last week (other than the 1,500 pages withheld, that is): \u201cWhen it comes to firearms, Elena Kagan\u2019s liberal bias stands out again and again throughout the documents. The Second Amendment consistently plays second fiddle to gun control in Kagan\u2019s analysis across issues such as gun-show regulations, trigger lock mandates, the Brady Bill, municipal lawsuits against gun manufacturers, the Congressional ban on assault weapons … and even the fundamental question of whether individuals have any Second Amendment rights. It is no wonder that Bill Clinton, the most pro-gun-control president in American history, put Kagan in charge of gun policy.\u201d<\/p>\n
No wonder the NRA finally came out in opposition to the Kagan nomination last week (despite a weeks-long \u201cgag order\u201d on their board members discussing the troll), warning — especially after previous Obama appointee Sonia Sotomayor lied about honoring gun rights in her own hearings last year — that \u201cMs. Kagan\u2019s record on the Second Amendment gives us no confidence that if confirmed to the Court, she will faithfully defend the fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms of law-abiding Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n
Will even Nevada\u2019s Harry Reid, currently behind in re-election polls, vote for this gun-grabber, placing far-left orthodoxy ahead of his cherished NRA rating and endorsement? Or will the NRA — in truth the nation\u2019s largest gun-control organization — endorse Dirty Harry despite a vote for Kagan, rewarding him for the $61 million federal pork grant which recently built Clark County a new public shooting range, where locals stupid enough to fall for the scam now go to shoot under government supervision, even as Mr. Reid and company systematically rule all the remaining swatches of vacant Nevada desert \u201coff limits\u201d to unsupervised recreational target practice?<\/p>\n
(Gun Owners of America have endorsed Republican Sharron Angle, who really carries a handgun. Interesting contrast.) <\/p>\n
Why have the national media provided such minimal coverage of these well-established Kagan positions, while they work themselves into a frenzy asking \u201cgotcha\u201d questions in attempts to discredit such conservative women as Sarah Palin of Alaska and Nevada\u2019s own Sharron Angle?<\/p>\n
A Kagan court would enforce few limits to a government-imposed nanny state. The nominee was asked by Sen. Tom Coburn \u201cIf I wanted to sponsor a bill and it said Americans, you have to eat three vegetables and three fruits every day and I got it through Congress and that\u2019s now the law of the land, got to do it, does that violate the commerce clause?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSounds like a dumb law,\u201d Kagan replied. \u201cBut I think that the question of whether it\u2019s a dumb law is different from the question of whether it\u2019s constitutional, and I think that courts would be wrong to strike down laws that they think are senseless just because they\u2019re senseless.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ms. Kagan ducked the question, of course, which is whether she as a justice would find such a law justified under the commerce clause. She later rallied to say such an edict might be disallowed if it didn\u2019t deal with \u201ceconomic activity.\u201d But of course requiring every American to eat an apple a day could be justified as benefiting the apple growers — just as Obamacare is now justified (albeit fraudulently) as a means to \u201creduce the collective costs of health care.\u201d<\/p>\n
The plain point is that a Justice Kagan would enforce hardly any limits to federal meddling in our lives.<\/p>\n
Barack Obama \u201crevealed his goal for the Supreme Court when he complained on Chicago radio station WBEZ-FM in 2001 that the Earl Warren Court wasn\u2019t \u2018radical\u2019 enough because \u2018it didn\u2019t break free from the essential constraints placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution\u2019 in order to allow \u2018redistribution of wealth,\u2019\u201d columnist Phyllis Schlafly reported this week.<\/p>\n
When Ms. Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School, she presented a guest speaker who \u201cis known as the most activist judge in the world: Judge Aharon Barak, formerly president of the Israeli Supreme Court,\u201d Ms. Schlafly reports. Mr. Barak has written that a judge should \u201cmake\u201d and \u201ccreate\u201d law, assume \u201ca role in the legislative process,\u201d and give statutes \u201cnew meaning that suits new social needs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Barak writes that a judge \u201cis subject to no authority\u201d except himself, and he \u201cmust sometimes depart the confines of his legal system and channel into it fundamental values not yet found in it.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is a far cry from traditional American jurisprudence. Yet Ms. Schlafly reports that Ms. Kagan described Judge Barak to her students as her \u201cjudicial hero.\u201d<\/p>\n
Judge Robert Bork calls Ms. Kagan\u2019s praise of Barak \u201cdisqualifying in and of itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before she\u2019s granted a lifetime appointment to fundamentally change 200 years of respect for the written law in the United States, will no senator ask Ms. Kagan whether she agrees with these power-mad positions of her \u201cjudicial hero\u201d?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nominated by a president whose party controls both houses of Congress, Solicitor General Elena Kagan\u2019s \u201cconfirmation hearings\u201d for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court are largely a formality. Nonetheless, the nominee\u2019s well-coached insistence on pathetically bland non-answers has been so exasperating — and insulting — that she might as well have placed a video […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010-election"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-8P","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=547"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":548,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547\/revisions\/548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}