Expose Obama
May 12th, 2010By Phillip Klein, American Spectator
Writing in the Washington Post in February, law professor Jeffrey Rosen made the provocative suggestion that President Obama should nominate himself to the Supreme Court. On Monday, Obama ended up doing just that.
Well, sort of.
In Elena Kagan, who is just one year apart from him in age, Obama has found somebody whose biography, temperament, and values (as far as they are known) closely resemble his own.
Like Obama, Kagan graduated Harvard Law School and taught law at the University of Chicago. Look into the backgrounds of Obama and Kagan, and you’ll find evidence of radicalism that was tempered by personal ambition. Obama served as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review and Kagan was the school’s first female dean, and they both had a reputation for treating conservatives fairly, despite ideological disagreements. Just as Obama ran for president on a thin public record, Kagan doesn’t offer much of a paper trail, leaving her views on many key issues open to speculation.
In 1980, according to the Daily Princetonian, Kagan got drunk on election night after liberal Democrat Elizabeth Holtzman lost a Senate race in New York, and regularly wrote editorials taking ideologically liberal positions.
“Where I grew up — on Manhattan’s Upper West Side — nobody ever admitted to voting for Republicans,” Kagan wrote after that election, according to the New York Times. As a child growing up in New York City, she wrote, those who were elected to political office were “real Democrats — not the closet Republicans that one sees so often these days but men and women committed to liberal principles and motivated by the ideal of an affirmative and compassionate government.”
and, more from Expose Obama
Kagan may have to sit out key cases for Obama agenda
May 12th, 2010By JULIE MASON, Washington Examiner
conflicts of interest could block her from ruling on cases dealing with Obama
President Obama’s nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court assumes that she will have to step aside on numerous cases. But that concern that was trumped by what Obama called her "skill as a consensus builder."
For Obama, installing Kagan on the high court would mean more than adding another like-minded constitutional scholar to the mix. Ideally, Kagan would bring outreach skills the more liberal members of the court have been lacking.
"She has a long record as a consensus builder and is the kind of person who can bridge the 5-4 splits that have become so routine on this court," said Sen. Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat and member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Kagan’s skill set appeals to Obama, who wants to expand on his first-year Supreme Court nomination of Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
While Sotomayor is a reliable liberal vote on the court and the first Latina to serve, she functions primarily as a counterpoint to the court’s conservatives. Obama perceives Kagan as a justice with a broader role on the court.
