The Kagan Hearings: Grill, Baby, Grill

NOMINATED. President Barack Obama announces Solicitor General Elena Kagan as his nominee for Supreme Court justice May 10 in the East Room of the White House.

Barack Obama wanted to be a transformative president. One way he is doing so is by the kinds of appointments he has been making.

So the nomination of Elena Kagan as a justice of the Supreme Court bears close scrutiny. At age 50, she could serve on the court for decades, leaving a legacy for good or for ill for generations to come.

Kagan, whom Obama nominated May 10, would if confirmed be the first Supreme Court justice in 40 years to come to the high court without prior judicial experience. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though the lack of a “paper trail” makes it a little more difficult to know how such a nominee would vote in cases that come before the court.

We do know from other evidence, though, that the solicitor general and former Harvard Law School dean is pro-abortion and sympathetic to the homosexual-rights cause.

Americans have a right to know how she would decide on issues that impact the future of people’s lives, especially unborn lives.

Issues that may come before the court over the course of the coming decades include same-sex “marriage,” and Kagan seems sympathetic to that cause. It’s foreseeable that the challenge to California’s Prop. 8, which restricts marriage to one man and one woman, could soon make its way to the Supreme Court.

As solicitor general, Kagan defended the Defense of Marriage Act. But that tells us little, since it is the job of the solicitor general to defend American law before the Supreme Court.

She also said, during her confirmation hearings for that position, that she didn’t believe there was a constitutional right to same-sex “marriage.” She later clarified what she meant.

“Constitutional rights are a product of constitutional text as interpreted by the courts and understood by the nation’s citizenry and its elected representatives,” she wrote to Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., March 18, 2009.

As National Review legal blogger Ed Whelan pointed out, “Kagan was saying only that the courts haven’t yet invented a federal constitutional right to same-sex ‘marriage.’”

Of course, earlier in her career, she was under no obligation to defend U.S. law, so it’s revealing that she took the audacious step of banning military recruiters from the campus of Harvard Law because she found the Clinton-era policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the U.S. military discriminatory. In a letter to students in 2003, she called the policy “a moral injustice of the first order.”

On the right to life, there is plenty of cause for concern. Pro-abortion organizations Planned Parenthood and Emily’s List have endorsed Kagan, and she has contributed financially to the pro-abortion National Partnership for Women and Families. Kagan “listed membership in” the partnership in a questionnaire she submitted in connection with her 1999 nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a nomination that ended when the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Republican chairman Orrin Hatch scheduled no hearing.

Kagan has criticized federal regulations that prohibited recipients of Title X family-planning funds, taxpayer dollars, from counseling women to get abortions — arguing they amounted to the subsidization of “anti-abortion” speech.

As several states’ attorneys general have brought lawsuits against Obamacare, it’s worth wondering how a Justice Kagan might vote on the crucial issue of taxpayers being forced to subsidize immoral practices such as abortion.

Kagan is used to being grilled. Now, instead of testifying before the Supreme Court, she’ll go before the Senate Judiciary Committee. But will that panel ask the questions you want them to ask?

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

Elena Kagan and her Socialist 'hero' Cass Sunstein
David Horowitz's DiscoverTheNetworks.org

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
_________________________________________________

From David Horowitz's
FrontPageMag.com/DiscoverTheNetworks.org
PROFILE: CASS SUNSTEIN
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[Cass Sunstein on Socialism and "wealth redistribution"]:
________________________________________________________________________________________

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

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