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?
This editorial will appear in the May 23 print edition of the Register. To subscribe, please call (800) 421-3230.
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How can anyone be surprised by the appointments of this president??? He does not honor life nor does he honor the Constitution; he does not honor Christianity nor does he honor this country. We can only hope and pray that he is a one term president and that the terrible damage he has done and continues to do can be undone…
May I please offer these?
“Myths and falsehoods about Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination”
http://mediamatters.org/research/201005100001
Legal experts contradict Limbaugh’s claim that Kagan “doesn’t like” First Amendment
http://mediamatters.org/research/201005120055
“But will that panel ask the questions you want them to ask?” The answer is NO if we let mediamatters.org get away with misleading citizens via a *crucial omission* in their “Myths and falsehoods [explanations] about Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination”—that Brian offered as a link in his May 16 comment. If that omission goes unchallenged the Senate Judiciary panel will get far too little pressure on vital questions Elena Kagan *must* be grilled on.
Given Kagan’s disturbing record on life issues and her apparently low regard for the Constitution itself, BEFORE the June 28 Kagan Hearings start we God-respecting citizens need to critically examine President Obama’s long term self-serving behavior in the area of demanding EMPATHY be exhibited in governing, law making and judging.
So important did Obama make the “exhibiting” of empathy that Senator Obama in 2005 felt bound to vote against John Roberts’ confirmation to the USSC on the *SOLE* ground that *he* saw almost no empathy exhibited by Roberts’ rulings. Mediamatters *omitted* this very revealing Obama-bias which was further discredited even by “pro-choice”, ranking Democrat Sen. Patrick Leahy’s *opposite action* toward Roberts—his voting FOR Roberts’ confirmation as a matter of *conscience*, no less! Obama simply feared the now Chief Justice Roberts being on our Highest Court.
Consider carefully reading Obama’s real disposition toward empathy (first link below) as revealed by him in 2005: “that *last mile* can only be determined on the basis of one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, *one’s broader perspectives on how the world works*, and the *depth* and *breadth* of one’s empathy”. [emphasis added]
Note Obama’s assigning TWO dimensions to signal just how vital empathy is to his nominee selections! So why should Americans be less concerned about Kagan? The “last mile” is his stated code for the really tough “5%” of cases where differences between a Scalia and a Ginsberg will be super-affected by the differences in their philosophies and depth and breadth of empathy.
http://obamaspeeches.com/031-Confirmation-of-Judge-John-Roberts-Obama-Speech.htm
A full reading of his 2005 speech suggests that later, during the heated 2008 election, the Obama team *learned for its future use* how to cleverly put empathy at *list’s-end* to give it an unalarming “also ran” type description such as mediamatters’ example in Brian’s link: “Obama has said that he seeks nominees who are dedicated to “the rule of law” and “our constitutional tradition” and who *also* exhibit empathy.”
Even more crucial for any trust “owed” a President is that Obama who still preaches “exhibit empathy”, himself exhibits *none whatsoever* with his own professed Savior’s feelings over HIS babies slaughtered daily in huge numbers via Obama’s executive orders and his facilitations of legislation and composition of the courts. A president showing zero empathy toward his savior will treat us with no empathy if we get in his way.
Since Barack Obama as both Senator and President professes to be a Christian, our examination of the man Obama must include reference to St. John 1:3. St. John teaches that “Through [Christ] all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made”. God’s new children, no matter how undeveloped, are not exempt from the “all” in John 1:3 Therefore it is President Obama’s *unnecessary* diligence in promoting, facilitating and protecting abortion “rights” that grievously offends Jesus.
Obama team web-crawlers likely came across the Jesus / Empathy conundrum with Obama in the following link, including its interior link to what Republicans failed to take advantage of, dating back to 2006, yet permanently available to Republicans if only they wake up during the *2010* campaigns:
http://www.michnews.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/463/21039
Fellow Americans Call & Write the Senate Judiciary Committee members and be *emphatic* about their probing for the depth and breadth of Kagan’s empathies. We know that nominees can dodge everything that *might* come up for a ruling. But continuing to play Russian roulette on the role of empathy is to destroy America. If the nominee wants the job, let’s better understand what is inside them. While Obama touts “elections have consequences”, that truth still has limits!
Consider that the topic of empathy is not yet as protected as is nominee comment on hypotheticals. If we value a responsibly-free America, nominees must be willing to reveal their core concerns, how they think the world works and their empathies – but not by being drawn out by “hypothetical cases”. Rather, it needs to be that the nominees WRITE on those three areas *before* the actual Hearing time, with *their* choice of examples, as a matter of Respect for the rest of the 300 Million citizens to be affected by them perhaps for decades. If we let them insultingly write only with *trivial* examples as a dodge, then we are de facto telling the Supreme Court to go ahead and legislate from their benches. They are presumed to be bright; let that meaningfully show in their writing assignment.
Let the Kagan Hearings be America’s first major response to almost Total Unaccountability of our Third Branch of Government. Our demand should be that empathy be both present and normal lest we have, for example, Kagan later ruling so much in favor of undocumented immigrants that Arizona citizens must live in constant fear because of “how the world works”. These days it often works by Theory F = Fear, with individual “rights” allowed to unjustly dominate legitimate community rights.
Given what Nancy Pelosi asked of our American Catholic Bishops, the USCCB *owes* American Catholics a completely frank “white paper” explaining that some societal problems allow for *prudential* judgments as to what is right (e.g., quite possibly Arizona’s new law) while others do not (e.g., procured abortion-killing of God’s womb babies). Without proper attention to prudential latitude, the bishops who account for much of Obama’s victory may again mislead America into a worse condition. They *owe* us sheep *clear explanations* in moral terms with explicit classification of the degree of “binding” and authority they assign to whatever is their position in the “white paper”.
Mr. William Folger has hit the nail on the head. Thank God for some sanity in this crazy world. Maybe we are in the end times.????
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