Posted on 05/10/2010 6:43:56 AM PDT by kristinn
Live from the East Room at the White House! Barack Obama announces his nomination of Solictor General Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court.
10 a.m. EDT.
Seems Kagan pisses off everyone. It is O’s Harriet Meyers moment
Here’s a post from Powerlineblog on Kagan:
President Obama will reportedly announce the appointment of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court today. I don’t know much about Kagan, but the little I do know raises a question in my mind about what kind of justice she will be.
As Dean of Harvard Law School, Kagan had to deal with the issue of compliance with the Solomon Amendment. Under the Solomon Amendment, universities receiving federal funding are required to allow the armed services to recruit on campus like other employers. It is a law that shouldn’t be necessary.
Harvard Law School was one of many prominent law schools that chose to violate the Solomon Amendment, citing the military’s don’t ask/don’t tell policy. The don’t ask/don’t tell policy is not just a whim of the armed forces. It is also the law of the land, but don’t tell law school deans about it. They have to worry about matters closer to home, like their own schools’ so-called nondiscrimination policies against hosting recruiters for employers that don’t toe the line on homosexual rights.
When the Department of Defense sent Harvard a notice that it intended to enforce the Solomon Amendment, Kagan announced that she would adhere to what I call the Yale Doctrine, in honor of the statement made by then-Yale Law Dean Anthony Kronman at the time:
We would never put at risk the overwhelmingly large financial interests of the University in federal funding. We have a point of principle to defend, but we will not defend this—at the expense of programs vital to the University and the world at large.
Dean Kronman paid a backhanded tribute to the “money talks” impetus behind the Solomon Amendment. Thus the Yale Doctrine: We take your money for the good of the world.
But neither Yale nor Harvard let it go at that. They both supported FAIR v Rumsfeld, the lawsuit opposing the Solomon Amendment.
Yale and others argued that the Solomon Amendment was unconstitutional. I thought that the legal merits of the FAIR lawsuit rivaled those of obesity lawsuits brought by overweight consumers against fast food outlets. A divided panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals held in favor of the plaintiffs, however, finding it likely that the Solomon Amendment unconstitutionally infringed the law school’s First Amendment rights.
When the Supreme Court accepted the Department of Defense’s appeal from the Third Circuit decision, Kagan got on board. She was one of 40 Harvard Law School professors who signed a friend-of-the-court brief written by Walter Dellinger supporting the FAIR plaintiffs.
In the brief Dellinger argued that the Solomon Amendment applied only to schools that specifically prohibited military access on campus, not to schools’ whose policies simply had the (allegedly) incidental effect of doing so. Dellinger distinguished the law schools’ contemporary anti-discrimination policies from Vietnam-era academic anti-military policies.
Dellinger’s argument based on the language of the Solomon Amendment was, to say the least, strained, and the Supreme Court gave it the back of its hand in the Court’s 9-0 opinion upholding the Solomon Amendment. Even Justice Stevens rejected it.
Here we have Kagan herself, as Dean of the Harvard Law School, signing off on a brief making an argument so far out that not a single member of the Supreme Court found it worthy of adherence. This would seem to provide some evidence for the proposition that Kagan’s views lie somewhere outside the mainstream of Supreme Court jurisprudence.
Perhaps the institutional imperatives to which she gave voice as dean of the Harvard Law School overrode her common sense. For other reasons, Kagan has noted she didn’t write the brief; she merely signed it.
Kagan’s side decisively lost the FAIR case in the Supreme Court. I wrote while the case was pending in the Supreme Court that some lawsuits deserve a fate worse than failure. While decent military recruiters suffered the rudeness of their purported betters at Yale Law School and elsewhere in silence, the armed services of the United States were (and are) actively defending the freedom of those schools from peril. The rank ingratitude of those who should know better is a disgrace that deserves to be widely recognized as such.
Perhaps....but then he might bring in a bigger leftie...
What was her role in Harvard’s ignoring the absolute lack of documentation and qualifications of B. Hussein Obama?
Is that really sufficient grounds for her to rule on its continued coverup?
Well...at least no one can complain about indications of her judicial bearing. She never was a judge.
It will help Obama with the Jewish and woman’s vote.
We first got a dodo, now it has been determined we need an enema.
Neither of which can spell constitution. I wonder why.
As an undergraduate at Princeton, Kagan wrote a senior thesis titled
"To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933."
In the "Acknowledgments" section of her work, she specifically thanked her brother Marc, “whose involvement in radical causes led me to explore the history of American radicalism in the hope of clarifying my own political ideas.” In the body of the thesis, Kagan wrote:
"In our own times, a coherent socialist movement is nowhere to be found in the United States. Americans are more likely to speak of a golden past than of a golden future, of capitalism’s glories than of socialism’s greatness. Conformity overrides dissent; the desire to conserve has overwhelmed the urge to alter. Such a state of affairs cries out for explanation. Why, in a society by no means perfect, has a radical party never attained the status of a major political force? Why, in particular, did the socialist movement never become an alternative to the nation’s established parties?...
"Through its own internal feuding, then, the SP [Socialist Party] exhausted itself forever and further reduced labor radicalism in New York to the position of marginality and insignificance from which it has never recovered. The story is a sad but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America. Radicals have often succumbed to the devastating bane of sectarianism; it is easier, after all, to fight one’s fellows than it is to battle an entrenched and powerful foe. Yet if the history of Local New York shows anything, it is that American radicals cannot afford to become their own worst enemies. In unity lies their only hope."http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2398
Obama to Pick Pro-Abort Elena Kagan for Supreme Court: Report
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/may/10050703.html
Excerpt: > In April, the White House reacted with fury when Ben Domenech, writing in a blog post for CBS News, declared that Kagan would be the "first openly gay justice" on the U.S. Supreme Court. Under increasing pressure from the Obama administration, CBS eventually pulled the post and Domenech apologized for "a Harvard rumor" - but not before posting an addendum stating: "I have to correct my text here to say that Kagan is apparently still closeted - odd, because her female partner is rather well known in Harvard circles."
The mainstream media is painting her as a moderate. Yeah...right...
I am very fed up with these sick sex people getting pushed in my face as leaders. This person is disgusting and I would never trust “it’s” opinion on ANYTHING!
Yea, another activist nominated to SCOTUS.
BORK HER BOYS! Sorry Ms. Kagan, you are not qualified, and you are a marxist pal. SO, no sorry. Tea Party Conservatives will NOT support your nomination, and those elected officials in the senate in the GOP had better HEAR THIS: N O on Kagan. Any questions GOP? Any at all? Good.
Vote no, thats the will of your constituents.
Good Lord. That nitwit Amy Klobuchar is on FNC singing Kagan’s praises. She’s got the talking points down PAT. (No pun intended)
“Just call her Pat”
LOL! And America can’t stand Pat!
How can a sitting judge be a judge when she/he is not a judge? Our country is going to sink into the wretch of history if this is allowed to stand/sit. We must fight this and also my kid laughed at the man with the ear rings and pearls. I was ashamed that is who he picked. What a loser of the highest degree!
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