Blog Archive

Monday, May 10, 2010

8 Problems with Elena Kagan

1- Kagan may well have less experience relevant to the work of being a justice than any justice in the last five decades or more. In addition to zero judicial experience, she has only a few years of real-world legal experience. Further, notwithstanding all her years in academia, she has only a scant record of legal scholarship. Kagan flunks her own “threshold” test of the minimal qualifications needed for a Supreme Court nominee.

Well, Obama failed the threshold test of the minimal qualifications needed for a presidential nominee, and got the job anyway. So how's that worked out for America?

2-Kagan is the consummate Obama insider, and her meteoric rise over the last 15 years—from obscure academic and Clinton White House staffer to Harvard law school dean to Supreme Court nominee—would seem to reflect...an “intermarriage of financial and executive branch elites [that] could only have happened in the Clinton years” and that has fostered the dominant financial-political oligarchy in America. In this regard, Kagan’s paid role as a Goldman Sachs adviser is the perfect marker of her status in the oligarchy—and of her unfathomable remoteness from ordinary Americans.

In other words, our lives will be controlled by yet another ivory-tower political elitist. Just what the doctor ordered for the Tea Party nation. Perhaps, though, that is exactly what Obama had in mind...

3- Kagan’s record thus manages to replicate the primary supposed defect of the judicial monastery—isolation from the real-world lives of ordinary Americans—without conferring the broader benefits of judicial experience.

That's a feature, not a bug, to the Democrats and the Obama administration.

4 - Kagan’s exclusion of military recruiters from the Harvard law school campus promises to draw considerable attention precisely because...it amounted to “a statement of national estrangement,” of Kagan’s “alienating [her]self from the country.” In her fervent opposition to the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law and the Solomon Amendment, Kagan elevated her own ideological commitment on gay rights above what Congress, acting on the advice of military leaders, had determined best served the interests of national security. At a time of war, in the face of the grand civilizational challenge that radical Islam poses, Kagan treated military recruiters worse than she treated the high-powered law firms that were donating their expensive legal services to anti-American terrorists.

Which again, puts her directly in alignment with the Obama/Clinton/Pelosi mindset. And in opposition to about 75% of Americans. But when has this administration acted with regard to anyone save their 25%?

5 - Kagan has argued that the Senate should carefully explore a nominee's views on judicial philosophy generally and on hotly contested constitutional issues in particular. Her argument has special force for someone who has been so guarded about her own views.

Seems to me that Kagen has essentially claimed that the selection of a nominee like herself pretty much demands Congressional interrogation and high scrutiny before such a pick is confirmed. Let's see how our ivory-tower intellectual reacts to being subject to the practice to which she preached. Based on her own writings, less than full disclosure should result in a non-confirmation, or at least a filibuster attempt. A philosophical shift under fire would be quite revealing, and would expose her as a woman who cannot live under the very legal system she preaches. Should this occur, watch for the cries of... "homophobia!"

6 - Kagan’s records from her White House years in the Clinton administration promise to offer important insights into her legal thinking. It makes no sense to schedule her confirmation hearing until it’s clear when those records will be made available.

Since the Obama administration is supposed to be "the most transparent ever", this shouldn't be a problem, right? Hmmm....

7 - Kagan shows signs of moderation on issues of presidential power and national security. But there’s no basis for hopes that she might secretly harbor conservative legal views on other matters

Remember how many conservatives switched to Obama because they believed his lofty rhetoric and felt he'd have to "govern from the center"? Remember that, when the media and the RHINOs are telling you this pick is a "reverse Souter".

8 - From the New York Post, we get these revealing lines:

Kagen...grew up as a "cool smart girl" on the Upper West Side.
it would mark the first time in history the US Supreme Court has not had a Protestant member.
...a pivotal event in her life was getting into elite Hunter College HS.

Her formative years were spent in Manhattan, where she grew up as the middle child in a well-to-do Upper West Side family.
Kagan went on to earn honors at Princeton -- where she was a student leader, along with classmate Eliot Spitzer -- and won a scholarship that sent her to Oxford for a master's degree..

We couldn't find a credible nominee that didn't go to an Ivy League, or other elitist school? (and yes, that should be a badge of shame, being that the Ivy League has been running the nation, and our economy, for the past decade or more). We couldn't find one who wasn't born with a silver spoon in their mouth? We couldn't find one credible candidate anywhere in flyover country - From Pennsylvania to Utah - that, though liberal, might bring a different perspective of life, their nation, and the world to the High Court?

Nope. Another ivory-tower Ivy-league know-it-all, prepared to exclude themselves from the very laws they will force unto us.

Time to man the battlements, folks....

Thanks to: The Corner and THE JERSEYNUT.