A Zionist Jewish Lesbian Feminist Not So Free Speech Friendly Nominee for the Supreme Court?

Please don't call the messenger names. I'm just pointing out the politically incorrect obvious. With the  important nomination of a new Supreme Court justice shouldn't we look at all the aspects of the person? Is Elena Kagan who 'we the people' would want? Of course 'we' don't get a vote.

John Paul Stevens said Friday he will step down when the court finishes its work for the summer in late June or early July.


Listening to NPR a couple of days ago it appeared that Elena Kagan, now Obama's solicitor general, was being promoted as Stevens replacement. For the sake of speculation, lets take a look at Kagan as the nominee.



She's another Clinton retread who from 1995 to 1999 served as President Bill Clinton's Associate White House Counsel  and Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council.

An interesting statement from Absolute Astronomy ...

Kagan has also written widely on a range of First Amendment issues and in ways supportive of free speech rights.

"In ways?"  Not very encouraging when we are supposed to rely on the Supreme Court to protect free speech. I wonder which ways she is and is not supportive?



During Kagan's solicitor general confirmation hearing she seemed to follow a Bush administration line of thinking which must also suit Obama well.

During her confirmation hearing last week, Elena Kagan, the nominee for solicitor general, said that someone suspected of helping finance Al Qaeda should be subject to battlefield law — indefinite detention without a trial — even if he were captured in a place like the Philippines rather than in a physical battle zone.

Ms. Kagan’s support for an elastic interpretation of the “battlefield” amplified remarks that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. made at his own confirmation hearing. And it dovetailed with a core Bush position. Civil liberties groups argue that people captured away from combat zones should go to prison only after trials. 

This makes me wonder if Kagan might someday apply indefinite detention without a trial or maybe even assassination  to American citizens right here in our country.


Glenn Greenwald says Kagan would mean the court would take a turn to the 'right' and perhaps an easier confirmation.

Replacing Stevens with Kagan (or, far less likely, with Sunstein) would shift the Court substantially to the Right on a litany of key issues (at least as much as the shift accomplished by George Bush's selection of the right-wing ideologue Sam Alito to replace the more moderate Sandra Day O'Connor).  Just click on the links in the last paragraph here, detailing some of Kagan's "centrist" (i.e., highly conservative) positions on executive power, civil liberties and Terrorism for a sense of how far to the Right she would be as compared to Stevens.

The danger that we won't have such a status-quo-maintaining selection is three-fold:  (1) Kagan, from her time at Harvard, is renowned for accommodating and incorporating conservative views, the kind of "post-ideological" attribute Obama finds so attractive; (2) for both political and substantive reasons, the Obama White House tends to avoid (with a few exceptions) any appointees to vital posts who are viewed as "liberal" or friendly to the Left; the temptation to avoid that kind of nominee heading into the 2010 midterm elections will be substantial (indeed, The New York Times' Peter Baker wrote last month of the candidates he said would be favored by the Left:  "insiders doubt Mr. Obama would pick any of them now"); and (3) Kagan has already proven herself to be a steadfast Obama loyalist with her work as his Solicitor General, and the desire to have on the Court someone who has demonstrated fealty to Obama's broad claims of executive authority is likely to be great.  {more}

And unlike nearly all the other potential nominees, Kagan is not likely to face sharp attacks from conservatives. At Harvard, she won glowing praise from prominent conservatives for bridging the ideological divide. {more at JTA}

Here's a little from Elena Kagan is Unfit for the Supreme Court ...

The President will want a highly qualified nominee, obviously.  Beyond that, the calculation for the White House will be almost entirely political.  Rahm Emanuel will have overriding control - if not minute-by-minute involvement - just as he did with Justice Sotomayor.  And as with that previous confirmation, the calculus will be one of the political costs and benefits of the highly qualified candidates at the political moment in time. {more}

A NY Times report on Kagan before the Supreme Court ...

Solicitor General Elena Kagan defended the law at issue in the case, which bars providing material support to terrorist organizations, as “a vital weapon in this nation’s continuing struggle against international terrorism.”

Even seemingly benign help is prohibited, Ms. Kagan said.

“Hezbollah builds bombs,” she said of the militant Islamic group. “Hezbollah also builds homes. What Congress decided was when you help Hezbollah build homes, you are also helping Hezbollah build bombs. That’s the entire theory behind the statute.”{more}

The Obama administration's representative before the high court, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, urged the justices not to hear the case that Valerie Plame Wilson and Joe Wilson brought against the Bush administration over the exposure of Mrs. Wilson's employment at the CIA. 


From Kevin MacDonald  on Kagan ...

Jews as one-third of the Supreme Court seems sure to raise the eyebrows among people like me who think that Jewish identity often makes a big difference in attitudes and behavior. And if there is one area where mainstream Jewish political identity has had a huge effect (besides anything related to Israel), it’s in attitudes and behavior related to multiculturalism. This is true of the Jewish mainstream across the entire Jewish political spectrum, from the far left to the neoconservative right. A major theme of The Culture of Critique is that Jewish identities and interests were apparent in all the Jewish-dominated intellectual movements of the left that have rationalized multiculturalism, massive non-White immigration, and the general displacement of Europeans: 

Viewed at its most abstract level, a fundamental agenda is thus to influence the European-derived peoples of the United States to view concern about their own demographic and cultural eclipse as irrational and as an indication of psychopathology. (Ch. 5 of The Culture of Critique; emphasis in original) 

Kagan seems to have lived a charmed life, with perhaps a whiff (or even a stench) of ethnic networking. At least one of the journalists writing the LA Times panegyric is Jewish (David G. Savage), and the two legal scholars who are quoted in the article (Fried and Tribe) are both Jews. In addition, Kagan was appointed Dean of Harvard Law by Lawrence Summers — also Jewish and with a strong Jewish identity. Summers and Kagan covered for Laurence Tribe when he lifted a passage from another scholar’s book without attribution. Ethnic networking is nothing if not reciprocal.

The only thing Kagan has going for her seems to be that important people admire her. She’s good at networking, and it would seem that many of her most prominent admirers are other Jews — liberal and conservative.

This points to corruption in the Jewish sector of the American academic elite. Kagan’s path to the academic heights of the legal profession and perhaps to a position on the Supreme Court is not based on a solid record of scholarship or any other relevant experience, but on ethnic boosterism from other Jews. As I noted elsewhere, Jews are represented in elite American academic institutions at levels far higher than can be explained by IQ.

For Kagan, the crusade to restrict speech is motivated by her feminist and leftist political attitudes. Indeed, her 1993 paper was originally presented at a conference titled, “Speech, Equality, and Harm: Feminist Legal Perspectives on Pornography and Hate Propaganda." She sees her job as a legal scholar to find a way to ensure that these goals are achieved while paying lip service to the legal tradition of the First Amendment. Indeed, she sees heavy-handed attempts to restrict free speech, such as the Stanford speech code, as counter-productive because they make “the forces of hatred into defenders of Constitutional liberty” and because they are so unreasonable they invite criticisms of the rest of Stanford’s race and gender policies.

They say politics is the art of the possible. For Kagan, law is also the art of the possible. There are no principles. Only better or worse tactics for achieving her policy goals. {more}

Kagan a lesbian?

"Why are people pretending that Elena Kagan is not a lesbian. She’s not out but that does not change her sexual orientation. She has a female partner. This is an open secret at Harvard Law School among students and faculty. I cannot speak for the broader legal community yet, but I’d have to believe her professional colleagues know as much or more than the students and professors she works with. The real irony would be if she did not get the nomination because she is not open, when the conventional wisdom has always been she has tiptoed through life in the closet for the very sake of winning a confirmation."

An all Catholic and Jewish Supreme Court? No Protestant justices on the court for the first time ever?

In fact, six of the nine justices on the current court are Roman Catholic. That's half of the 12 Catholics who have ever served on the court. Only seven Jews have ever served, and two of them are there now. Depending on the Stevens replacement, there may be no Protestants left on the court at all in a majority Protestant nation where, for decades and generations, all of the justices were Protestant. {more}