Day two of the Elena Kagan confirmation hearings saw a little less posturing than yesterday’s opening salvos by Senators bent on diverting attention from Kagan’s record by excoriating the current Supreme Court and falsely characterizing it as a bunch of “conservative activists.” Unfortunately, there was the same lack of meaningful information regarding Kagan’s qualifications to be given a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Kagan dodged probing questions on a wide range of important legal issues – the value of precedent, the role of the Court, the identification of …
Elena Kagan is a notably opaque Supreme Court nominee. In order to perform their constitutional function, the members of the Senate will have to reach a conclusion about her views and whether they are in the mainstream. Certain of the documents that she has generated give clues that lead to disturbing answers. One such document is her 1987 memorandum to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall regarding the petition for certiorari in Pughsley v. O’Leary, written while she was one of his clerks. In that memo, Kagan demonstrates how far out of the …
Deputy Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation Robert Alt is scheduled to testify as a minority witness this Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the nomination of Elena Kagan to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Throughout the hearings, he and his colleagues will be providing real-time updates here at The Foundry. This post will remain at the top of the page throughout. Please look below for other fresh perspectives on the day’s news and …
We didn’t hear any questioning of Elena Kagan in the first day of her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, but we did get the opening statements of all of the senators on the Committee and we heard from the nominee herself. The Democrats have 12 members including the chairman, Patrick Leahy (VT), and Herb Kohl (WI), Dianne Feinstein (CA), Russ Feingold (WI), Arlen Specter (PA), Chuck Schumer (NY), Dick Durbin (IL), Benjamin Cardin (MD), Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), Amy Klobuchar (MN), Ted Kaufman (DE), and Al Franken (MN). The …
In their opening statements today in the confirmation hearings of nominee Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court, liberal Senators have taken to arguing that a Justice’s job is not to “call balls and strikes.” Most conservatives rightly believe the law should govern, not judges, and that Supreme Court Justices should interpret the law as it is written. Conservatives have therefore promoted the “balls and strikes” analogy ever since then-Judge John Roberts used it during his confirmation process before becoming Chief Justice. Roberts said that, if confirmed, “I will remember that …
Listening to Senators Feinstein, Durbin, Leahy and Schumer castigating the current members of the U.S. Supreme Court in their opening statements in the Kagan confirmation hearing shows that they apparently want to turn this proceeding into a star chamber on Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, among others, as opposed to an examination of Elena Kagan’s judicial philosophy and ideology. Hearing their repetitive attacks on the Court’s decision in the Citizens United v. FEC decision also reminds me of a famous quote by Vladimir Lenin, who once said that if …
As the confirmation hearings of Elena Kagan got underway at 12:30, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jeff Sessions (R-AL), lost no time getting to the heart of the concerns that are raised by Elena Kagan’s nomination by President Obama to the Supreme Court: Ms. Kagan has less real legal experience of any nominee in at least fifty years. It’s not just that she has never been a judge. She has barely practiced law, and not with the intensity and duration from which real understanding occurs. Ms. Kagan …
Moments ago, the Supreme Court announced that, Yes Virginia, the Second Amendment does in fact apply to the states, and thereby struck down Chicago’s complete ban on handgun possession. But this decision (and the Court’s prior decision in Heller) raises still other questions which will likely have a substantial impact on what that Second Amendment right functionally means. For example, what constitutes a reasonable regulation on firearms under the Second Amendment? Chicago Mayor Richard Daley is wasting no time. Before the Supreme Court even issued its opinion, he said that …
The Senate Judiciary Committee will begin its hearing today on the nomination of Elena Kagan to be the next Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Kagan is no stranger to the confirmation process; in fact, she devoted one of her few academic writings entirely to the subject, writing: The Senate’s consideration of a nominee, and particularly the Senate’s confirmation hearings, ought to focus on substantive issues; the Senate ought to view the hearings as an opportunity to gain knowledge and promote public understanding of what the …
Prior to his presidency, Senator Obama famously announced that empathy would be his criteria for selecting judges. Although Sonia Sotomayor deemphasized her empathetic understanding of the law, many on the left still advocate empathy as the criteria for judges. James Gibson is no exception. In a recent article, “Expecting Justice and Hoping for Empathy,” Gibson discusses his recent survey that revealed 68% of polled individuals strongly agree with the statement that justices should “Be able to empathize with ordinary people – that is, to be able understand how the law …
