Elena Kagan's writings suggest judge's proper role

WASHINGTON — Elena Kagan, a Supreme Court nominee without judicial experience, has suggested in writings and speeches over a quarter-century that when judges make decisions, they must take account of their values and experience and consider politics and policy, rather than act as robotic umpires.

Her words stand in contrast to the more technical view of judging voiced by Chief Justice John Roberts at his confirmation hearing five years ago. Roberts said he considered himself an umpire merely calling balls and strikes.

"It should be no surprise by now that many of the votes a Supreme Court justice casts have little to do with technical legal ability and much to do with conceptions of value," Kagan said in a review of Yale law professor Stephen Carter's book "The Confirmation Mess."

Kagan quoted Carter approvingly to say that to decide the hard cases that rise to the level of Supreme Court review, justices must use their judgment. When they do that, Kagan said (again citing Carter), their "own experience and values become the most important data."

It may be hard to divine just what Kagan meant, but it's "not calling balls and strikes," says Georgetown University law professor Pamela Harris

Elena Kagan and her Socialist 'hero' Cass Sunstein

From David Horowitz's
FrontPageMag.com/DiscoverTheNetworks.org
PROFILE: ELENA KAGAN

When it was announced in 2008 that Cass Sunstein would be joining the Harvard Law School faculty, Kagan said:

"Cass Sunstein is the preeminent legal scholar of our time -- the most wide-ranging, the most prolific, the most cited, and the most influential. His work in any one of the fields he pursues -- administrative law and policy, constitutional law and theory, behavioral economics and law, environmental law, to name a non-exhaustive few -- would put him in the very front ranks of legal scholars; the combination is singular and breathtaking."

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2398
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From David Horowitz's
FrontPageMag.com/DiscoverTheNetworks.org
PROFILE: CASS SUNSTEIN
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[Cass Sunstein on Socialism and "wealth redistribution"]:
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Sunstein has argued in favor of bringing socialism (in the form of expanded wefare benefits and wealth redistribution) to the United States, but contends that the country's "white majority" opposes such a development because of deep-seated racism:

"The absence of a European-style social welfare state is certainly connected with the widespread perception among the white majority that the relevant programs would disproportionately benefit African Americans (and more recently Hispanics)."

Sunstein depicts socialist nations as being more committed than their capitalist counterparts to the welfare of their own citizens:

"During the Cold War, the debate about [social welfare] guarantees took the form of pervasive disagreement between the United States and its communist adversaries. Americans emphasized the importance of civil and political liberties, above all free speech and freedom of religion, while communist nations stressed the right to a job, health care, and a social minimum."

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[Cass Sunstein on "Climate Change" and "distributive justice"]:
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In 2007 Sunstein co-authored (with fellow attorney Eric A. Posner) a 39-page University of Chicago Law School paper titled "Climate Change Justice," which held that it was "desirable" for America to pay "justice" to poorer nations by entering into a compensation agreement that would result in a financial loss for the United States. The paper refers several times to "distributive justice."

Sunstein and Posner further speculate about the possibility of achieving this redistribution by means other than direct payments:

"It is even possible that desirable redistribution is more likely to occur through climate change policy than otherwise, or to be accomplished more effectively through climate policy than through direct foreign aid."
"We agree that if the United States does spend a great deal on emissions reductions as part of an international agreement, and if the agreement does give particular help to disadvantaged people, considerations of distributive justice support its action, even if better redistributive mechanisms are imaginable."
"If the United States agrees to participate in a climate change agreement on terms that are not in the nation's interest, but that help the world as a whole, there would be no reason for complaint, certainly if such participation is more helpful to poor nations than conventional foreign-aid alternatives."
"If we care about social welfare, we should approve of a situation in which a wealthy nation is willing to engage in a degree of self-sacrifice when the world benefits more than that nation loses."

[snip]

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[Cass Sunstein on the "Fairness Doctrine" (restricting opposing political views)]:
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Also in The Partial Constitution, Sunstein promotes the notion of a "First Amendment New Deal" in the form of a new "Fairness Doctrine" that would authorize a panel of "nonpartisan experts" to ensure that a "diversity of view[s]" is presented on the airwaves.
[snip]

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[Cass Sunstein on federally-funded abortions]:
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With regard to citizens who object to having their tax dollars finance abortions, Sunstein writes:

"There would be no tension with the establishment clause if people with religious or other objections were forced to pay for that procedure (abortion). Indeed, taxpayers are often forced to pay for things - national defense, welfare, certain forms of art, and others - to which they have powerful moral and even religious objections."

Lots more on Cass Sunstein here:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2422

We are one vote away from the forced governmental dismantling of the First Amendment, through every medium including the internet and the radio.

We are one vote away from the confiscation of every privately owned gun.

We are one vote away from the complete Stalinist eradication of every Christian symbol from public life.

We are one vote away from the insane notion that the Constitution guarantees full and complete health care, a home and a job to everyone who wants one.

We are one vote away from New Haven Fire Fighters becoming the law of the land, when your child’s grades, years of study, and hard work are thrown down the sewer of political correctness if the racial outcome does not meet the pyscho-left’s definition of racial equality.

We are one vote away from the eradication of property rights.

We are one vote away from the takeover of private industry by the government.

We are one vote away from mandated sterilizations and the decree that humans and their breath are a form of pollution.

We are one vote away from Big Brother - just one, and they will not relent because these appointments are of a very extremist nature with a leftist political agenda. They mean to change America through the will of leftist judges - and not through the ballot box because their ideology is rejected.

Our sacred Bill of Rights will be gone. The power of the State will not be stopped.

From David Horowitz's
FrontPageMag.com/DiscoverTheNetworks.org
PROFILE: ELENA KAGAN

Served as President Bill Clinton's Associate White House Counsel
Former dean of Harvard Law School
Sought to overturn the Solomon Amendment, a law that denies federal funding to any university that bars military recruiters from its campus
Believes that the military should open its ranks and barracks to homosexuals, without restriction
Was appointed U.S. Solicitor General by President Barack Obama in January 2009

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."
Lots more on Kagan here:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2398
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Link to Kagan's complete thesis here (pdf file):
http://www.redstate.com/erick/files/2010/05/kaganthesis.pdf

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