Monday, May 10, 2010

HOPE? Obama's Court Pick: No Judicial Experience, Kagan Booted Recruiters, Linked GOP Terror Proposal to 'Dictatorships,' Wrote Thesis on Socialism


SCOTUS fight: Boxing Elena
By Michelle Malkin

Monday opens with a SCOTUS bang. NBC News reports tonight that Harvard Law School dean turned solicitor general Elena Kagan will be the White House SCOTUS nominee to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. It was widely rumored she would be the pick leading into the weekend. The announcement is expected at 11 a.m. Eastern:

President Barack Obama will nominate U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan to serve as an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, NBC News’ Pete Williams reported late Sunday night.

Kagan, 50, served as the Dean of Harvard Law School from 2003 to 2009. Obama nominated her to serve in her current post as solicitor general early in 2009, and she won Senate confirmation by a vote of 61-31. She is the first woman to serve as solicitor general of the United States.

She was widely viewed as a front-runner when Obama was considering candidates for a Supreme Court opening last year, but the president ultimately chose Sonia Sotomayor for the job.

The Beltway conventional wisdom has already cast her as a “mooooderate” and a “pragmatist.” Ed Whelan at Bench Memos has the appropriate retort to that narrative.

And here’s a reminder from my blog almost exactly a year ago when Kagan was on the short list for the SCOTUS slot that ultimately went to Sonia Sotomayor:

“Dean Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court would be concerning given her complete lack of judicial or appellate experience. She has never been a judge or even argued a case in a court of appeals. It is difficult to see how her experience fundraising for Harvard Law School qualifies her for a seat on the Nation’s high court.

-Dean Kagan has taken positions that are disturbingly out of the mainstream. For example, driven by her view that the “don’t ask; don’t tell” policy adopted by a Democrat Congress and President Clinton is “a profound wrong–a moral injustice of the first order,” she argued that it violates the First Amendment for the United States to withhold funds from colleges that ban the military from recruiting on campus. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected this view.

-It is also unclear that a Justice Kagan would be an adequately independent check on executive excesses. She has argued in favor of greatly enhanced presidential control over the bureaucracy, which is concerning in light of President Obama’s unprecedented centralization of power in the White House.

-Dean Kagan has argued that nominees to the Supreme Court should undergo a searching inquiry into the nominee’s substantive views of the law, and should comment particular issues. If nominated, it will be interesting to see whether Dean Kagan remains faithful to this prescription in answering the Committee’s questions.”

The nutroots aren’t happy with Kagan’s clubby academic ties or her work for Goldman Sachs. HuffPo: READ MORE...

UPDATE- Kagan Booted Recruiters, Linked GOP Terror Proposal to 'Dictatorships,' Wrote Thesis on Socialism

2 comments:

  1. Yet another Harvard elitisit anti-American scumbag liberal choosen by Obama to be a supreme court judge. I will never understand why anyone would vote democrat.

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  2. This guy looks scary!! Wait, you say that's a female? Get out of here!!

    ReplyDelete