Elena Kagan: Not Sure ‘I Would've Been President Obama's Nominee If I Weren't a Woman’

Hey, it's something that conservatives can recall well. When it came to twice getting an opportunity to pick a Supreme Court justice, qualified men around the country had zero chance of getting selected. Because Barack Obama, in bowing down to his far-Left, liberal base (rather then seeking the best candidate regardless of gender) was going to pick a woman no matter what. Thanks to Justice Kagan for confirming what conservatives already long knew:

Justice Elena Kagan said she was “not sure” if President Barack Obama would have nominated her to the Supreme Court if she had not been a woman.

During a talk before law students on Friday at the University of Tennessee Law School, Kagan said, “And to tell you the truth, there were also things that I got because I was a woman. I mean I'm not sure I'd be sitting here.”

“I'm not sure that I would've been President Obama's nominee if I weren't a woman,” she said. “And if he wasn't as committed as he was to ensuring that there was diversity on the Supreme Court.”

“So, mostly what I think when I think about this question is how far we've come and how much I owe -- and all the women who have come after me owe-- to people like Justice Ginsburg and Justice O'Connor,” she said.

Kagan was initially asked by Dean of Tennessee Law School Doug Blaze, “It’s been a remarkable career, and you’ve been quite a pioneer along the way. [The] first woman to be Dean of the Harvard Law School, first woman solicitor general of the United States. You’re now the fourth woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court and one of three presently serving.”

“Along the way, what challenges have you faced as a woman and what changes have you seen in the legal profession, if any, over that period of time?" he said.

Kagan replied that most of the challenges of being a woman in the legal profession were already overcome by the women who preceded her.

“Well, I feel pretty lucky that I haven’t had to surmount all that many barriers or leap over all that many hurdles that were there because I was a woman,” said Kagan. “And I think that that’s because of the time I came along where a lot of the women who preceded me had done a lot of the hard work to make sure that women and men were evaluated equally and had the same opportunities as each other.”

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Elena Kagan Cheered ObamaCare Passage

Need any more reason why this Obamabot should recuse herself from the upcoming case?

On Sunday, March 21, 2010, the day the House of Representatives passed President Barack Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, then-Solicitor General Elena Kagan and famed Supreme Court litigator and Harvard Law Prof. Laurence Tribe, who was then serving in the Justice Department, had an email exchange in which they discussed the pending health-care vote, according to documents the Department of Justice released late Wednesday to the Media Research Center, CNSNews.com's parent organization, and to Judicial Watch.


“I hear they have the votes, Larry!! Simply amazing,” Kagan said to Tribe in one of the emails.


The Justice Department released a new batch of emails on Wednesday evening as its latest response to Freedom of Information Act requests filed by CNSNews.com and Judicial Watch. Both organizations filed federal lawsuits against DOJ after the department did not initially respond to the requests. CNSNews.com originally filed its FOIA request on May 25, 2010--before Elena Kagan's June 2010 Supreme Court confirmation hearings.


The March 2010 email exchange between Kagan and Tribe raises new questions about whether Kagan must recuse herself from judging cases involving the health-care law that Obama signed--and which became the target of legal challenges--while Kagan was serving as Obama's solicitor general and was responsible for defending his administration’s positions in court disputes.


According to 28 USC 455, a Supreme Court justice must recuse from “any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” The law also says a justice must recuse anytime he has “expressed an opinion concerning the merits of the particular case in controversy” while he “served in governmental employment.”


In response to questions from CNSNews.com, Prof. Tribe said on Thursday that other than the references in his email exchange with Kagan on March 21, 2010, he never had any communications with Elena Kagan while she was solicitor general relating to pending or enacted health-care legislation or actual or anticipated health-care related litigation. Tribe also said he sees no reason to believe 28 USC 455 would require Kagan’s recusal from cases involving PPACA.


The March 21, 2010 email exchange between Kagan and Tribe was started by Tribe who addressed an email to Kagan at her Justice Department email account. Tribe also copied this message to another individual, whose name has been redacted from the version of the document DOJ released to the MRC.


The subject line on Tribe’s email reads: “fingers and toes crossed today!”—an apparent reference to the unusual Sunday vote on the health-care bill that would occur later that day in the House. In the email, Tribe reminded Kagan of a dinner meeting they had to postpone and suggested they reschedule it.


Kagan responded to the message in a return email that is addressed solely to Tribe. The subject line on this Kagan-to-Tribe email is: “Re: fingers and toes crossed today!”


Kagan punctuated the first sentence of this email to Tribe with two exclamation marks: “I hear they have the votes, Larry!! Simply amazing.”

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Sonia Sotomayor And Elena Kagan Vote The Same All The Time

I get the fact that the Anthony Weiner stuff is dominating current landscape, but the fact that Sotomayor and Kagan vote more alike than Scalia and Thomas (two justices liberals have told us for years are one and the same) do is something the conservative media needs to be concerned about:

They're in a New York state of mind.


The newest members of the nation's highest court -- local Obama appointees Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan -- have agreed with each other in all 23 cases they've voted on, which is a supreme rarity, observers said.


Liberal critics who deride the Supreme Court's rightward shift over the past 10 years have cited conservative alliances like "Scalito," Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito.


But Scalia and Alito have agreed with each other in only 84 percent of cases in the current term, which winds up this month.


egal scholars find the Sotomayor-Kagan mind meld a bit unusual but hardly shocking.


"The pattern of agreement is typically based on ideology or a view of the law," said professor Barry Friedman of NYU Law School. "It's not that surprising that Barack Obama's two appointees showed agreement."


But the New York twins don't just agree in general terms. Justices can agree fully or partially in a case, depending on whether they write a separate concurring or dissenting opinion. Often two justices will come to the same general conclusion for very different reasons.


Sotomayor, who joined the court two years ago, and Kagan, who began serving last October, agreed fully 91 percent of the time.


Scalia and Alito were in full agreement only 59 percent of the time, according to statistics compiled by the Web site SCOTUSblog.


Only three other pairs of justices fully agreed more than 79 percent of the time.

Elena Kagan Sworn In As 4th Woman On Supreme Court

Newsmax.com:

Elena Kagan was sworn in Saturday as the 112th justice and fourth woman ever to serve on the Supreme Court.

Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath to Kagan in a brief private ceremony at the court. Kagan, joined by family and friends, pledged to faithfully and impartially uphold the law.

Afterward, she smiled broadly as a crowd of onlookers stood and applauded. "We look forward to serving with you," Roberts said.

Kagan, a former Harvard Law School dean who most recently was solicitor general, was President Barack Obama's choice to succeed retired Justice John Paul Stevens. Republicans criticized her as a political liberal, before the Senate confirmed her this past week on a vote of 63-37.

She was sworn in twice Saturday by Roberts — reciting one oath as prescribed by the Constitution during a ceremony in a conference room at the court with only her family present. Kagan then recited a second oath, taken by judges, with her family and friends and reporters present.

Kagan won't be formally installed as a justice until Oct. 1 in a courtroom ceremony at the start of the court's new term. But after the oaths taken on Saturday, she will be able to begin assuming her duties as a justice, which include reviewing cases and emergency appeals filed to the Supreme Court.

If it turns out that she's a liberal it makes no difference to SCOTUS. If it turns out that she abides by the Constitution the Left will cook her and Barry's ass.

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White House Releases New Elena Kagan Video

CNN.com:

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan describes herself an "open minded person, a fair person" and pledges to "faithfully apply the law and do the best I can to decide it in the right way," in a new video posted Tuesday on the White House website.

The White House uses the video to offer another side about President Obama's choice to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens to the Court. Kagan talks about her childhood in New York, education at Harvard Law School, time as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, dean of Harvard Law School, and her current role as solicitor general.

The video is narrated by the 50-year-old Kagan, and features still photographs of her during various different times in her life, and video from Monday's announcement of her nomination at the White House.

In a nutshell here's the knock on Elena Kagan: never served on any bench, slim legal writings and yeah, she could be a lesbo (tho I doubt the latter only because in an era where some famous yahoo or wannabee famous yahoo is "coming out" like every week, if Kagan was gay I think it would've been confirmed by someone by now). But then, for conservatives there are some pluses: Kagan has gone on record saying that she doesn't believe that there is a constitutional right to gay marriage, she encouraged Bill Clinton to support a compromise ban on late-term abortions and she has stated on record that terrorist detainees don't have an automatic right to due process. Sure, she's an Obama crony and sure Barry didn't seem to think that there were any Black judges good enough to be considered for a SCOTUS nominee, but altogether Barry certainly could've done a lot worse and hey, the fact that Kagan's catching more flak from the Left then the Right can't be bad news either..

Is Elena Kagan The Next Harriet Miers?

TheDailyBeast.com:

Top Supreme Court contender Elena Kagan, is an able administrator with a shamefully thin record of legal scholarship. Paul Campos compares her to the hapless Bush nominee who got laughed out of town. 

 

As the rumblings become louder that President Obama is going to choose U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan as our next Supreme Court justice, somebody needs to ask a rather impolitic question: How, precisely, is Kagan's prospective nomination different from George W. Bush's ill-fated attempt to put Harriet Miers on the nation's highest court?

On its face, the question seems absurd. Five years ago, Miers was derided as a careerist mediocrity whose primary qualification to be on the Supreme Court was a slavish devotion to President Bush. Kagan, by contrast is a purportedly "brilliant" legal scholar who was granted tenure at the University of Chicago and Harvard, before becoming dean of the latter's law school.

Kagan's work reminded me of Orwell's observation that, if book reviewers were honest, 19 of 20 reviews would consist of the sentence, "this book inspires in me no thoughts whatever."

Yesterday, I read everything Elena Kagan has ever published. It didn't take long: in the nearly 20 years since Kagan became a law professor, she's published very little academic scholarship—three law review articles, along with a couple of shorter essays and two brief book reviews. Somehow, Kagan got tenure at Chicago in 1995 on the basis of a single article in The Supreme Court Review—a scholarly journal edited by Chicago's own faculty—and a short essay in the school's law review. She then worked in the Clinton administration for several years before joining Harvard as a visiting professor of law in 1999. While there she published two articles, but since receiving tenure from Harvard in 2001 (and becoming dean of the law school in 2003) she has published nothing. (While it's true law school deans often do little scholarly writing during their terms, Kagan is remarkable both for how little she did in the dozen years prior to becoming Harvard's dean, and for never having written anything intended for a more general audience, either before or after taking that position.)

Kagan's handful of publications touch on topics like regulating offensive speech, analyzing legislative motivations for speech regulations, and evaluating the process of administrative law-making. But on the vast majority of issues before the Court, Kagan has no stated opinion. Her scholarship provides no clues regarding how she would rule on such crucial contemporary issues as the scope of the president's power in wartime, the legality of torture, or the ability of Congress to rein in campaign spending by corporations.

I know that their are going to be Obama stans out there who'd support Barry if he picked Santa Claus for SCOTUS, but the fact that Kagan has never been a judge, to me, should alarm those on the Left and the Right.

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