Official Kagan Confirmation Hearing thread - comments and opinions?

[Brian4Liberty]

Lyndsey Graham is up there kissing Kagan's ass right now...and also talking about how she will help fight the war on terror. :rolleyes:

Then he says, "it won't change the balance of power!". That logic is being used by the Lefties and big government advocates to defend Kagan. "Just confirm her. It doesn't make a difference. It keeps everything the same." No, it doesn't! Isn't this an example of Hegelian dialectic? They keep moving farther and farther towards Statism, but tell you it is just balancing the right and left. Each replacement is worse than the one they replaced.

[Brian4Liberty]

Schumer keeps calling her "General Kagan". (No doubt part of her current title.) Says she is the "perfect candidate, straight from central casting". Talk about a double entendre. Insiders are having fun with this...

[Brian4Liberty]

A Senator brought up the subject of Kagan's personal role model for judges, Aharon Barak. Didn't catch who it was. It was earlier. Anyone catch that?


Former Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork is opposing Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s nomination to the high court because she admires Aharon Barak – the former chief justice of Israel’s supreme court whom conservatives regard as an activist liberal judge.

In a conference call sponsored by Americans United for Life, Bork said that Kagan’s praise for Barak shows she doesn’t yet have a mature judicial philosophy. He called Barak “the worst judge on the planet,” who touts his own reputation as an activist judge in Israel.

“It’s disqualifying in and of itself,” Bork said of Kagan’s opinion of Barak.

When she introduced him at Harvard Law School in 2006, Kagan reportedly called Barak “her hero” and praised him as “the judge who has best advanced democracy, human rights, the rule of law and justice.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38920.html#ixzz0sAlffxdK

[moostraks]

Online source here: http://www.c-span.org/Watch/C-SPAN3.aspx for anyone interested...

[moostraks]

Schumer keeps calling her "General Kagan". (No doubt part of her current title.) Says she is the "perfect candidate, straight from central casting". Talk about a double entendre. Insiders are having fun with this...

ugh...

[Aratus]

senator graham likes her? its mayhap 50/50 still if sen. mitch mcconnell does a fillibuster.
the minority leader may save up his ample and apt lung capacity for the wall street bill.
the insiders LIKE her... it may be much easier for her than if ms. hillary was in her place.

[Brian4Liberty]

The seeming lack of interest in the Kagan nomination is a bit disturbing. No one is really opposing her. There is no interest from any part of the "liberty" movement. Everyone seems to be resigned to defeat on this.

Kagan represents the anti-thesis of everything Ron Paul. A Harvard Law professor who wants to disassemble the Bill of Rights, expand government, socialism, communism, statism and Corporatism. Lyndsey Graham and Joe Lieberman believe she will help them fight the the war on terrorism. She worked for Goldman Sachs. How does she feel about the Federal Reserve? One can only guess...

[tangent4ronpaul]

has anyone brought up that she's an enemy of the first and second amendments?

-t

[Stop Making Cents]

It's an illegal appoinment to the Court since Barry is not Constitutionally qualified to hold the office.

She will be impeached once Barry is removed from office for treason.

[DeadheadForPaul]

It's an illegal appoinment to the Court since Barry is not Constitutionally qualified to hold the office.

She will be impeached once Barry is removed from office for treason.

:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes: :rolleyes::rolleyes:

[tangent4ronpaul]

EDITORIAL: The case against Kagan
Radical Obama nominee answers to politics, not the law

Solicitor General Elena Kagan is too political, too leftist, too inexperienced and too disrespectful towards existing law to be confirmed for the U.S. Supreme Court. As Ms. Kagan's nomination hearings begin on Monday, what we now know about her should disturb fair-minded Americans, and should embolden moderate senators of both parties to avoid rubber-stamping her for a lifetime appointment. The pressure should be most intense not on Republicans, but on Democrats who claim moderation and yet try to explain away Ms. Kagan's history of leftist proselytizing.

No amount of personal charm on Ms. Kagan's part should obscure her actual record. Here's what we know about this former dean of Harvard Law School:

We know she is remarkably lacking in courtroom experience. Until Ms. Kagan became solicitor general, she not only had never been a judge, but she also had not even argued a single appeals case in her entire career. Her few arguments as solicitor general have been undistinguished. In one, the justices had to remind her that she was to answer their questions, not ask them questions of her own.

We know she deliberately ignored the law while at Harvard, and unfairly besmirched our military in time of war. The facts are simple. A law known as the Solomon Amendment made it illegal to keep military recruiters off of college campuses. An appeals court ruled that the law should be overturned but immediately made its own ruling inapplicable until it could be reviewed by the Supreme Court. Then-Dean Kagan barred the recruiters from campus anyway, thus flouting the law. She called the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" rule on homosexual practices "a moral injustice of the first order," even though she herself had served in the Clinton White House that developed the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" rule in the first place. Then, when she supported a challenge to the Solomon Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled against her position 8-0 - an overwhelming rejection of her anti-military stance.

Somebody who openly flouts the law should not be one of the law's ultimate arbiters.

We know she cut corners in order to preserve partial-birth abortions. Vast majorities of the American public oppose partial-birth abortion, which involves crushing the skull of a partially born baby and which the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan characterized as, for all intents and purposes, open "infanticide." Yet when serving as a legal adviser to former President Bill Clinton, Ms. Kagan deliberately withheld from the president a finding by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that partial-birth abortion is virtually never "the least risky, let alone the 'necessary,' approach." As accurately summarized by the National Right to Life Committee, the result was this: "Ms. Kagan played a key role in keeping the brutal partial-birth abortion method legal for an additional decade."

We know she is willing to undercut First Amendment free speech for political purposes. Ms. Kagan argued before the Supreme Court that the law should be read to allow the government to prohibit the publication of political pamphlets. In a nation stirred to its own founding by political pamphlets such as "Common Sense" and "The Federalist Papers," this is an extremely disturbing position. Ms. Kagan also has written of the benefits of "redistribution of expression," and has written that speech rights are to be "dol[ed] out" as a "favor" from government rather than being pre-existing rights that government cannot take away. She has argued that government would be justified in "disfavoring [an] idea [to] 'unskew,' rather than skew, public discourse."

We know Ms. Kagan is hostile to gun rights. Curt Levey of the conservative Committee for Justice has closely and fully analyzed the record. His conclusion is worth quoting in full: "When it comes to firearms, Elena Kagan's liberal bias stands out again and again throughout the documents. The Second Amendment consistently plays second fiddle to gun control in Kagan's analysis across issues such as gun-show regulations, trigger-lock mandates, the Brady Bill, municipal lawsuits against gun manufacturers, the congressional ban on assault weapons, an executive order banning semiautomatic weapons, use of executive agencies to push gun safety, use of state and local police to conduct background checks, and even the fundamental question of whether individuals have any Second Amendment rights."

We know she believes foreign law is highly relevant to U.S. law. In a New Hampshire speech on Oct. 6, 2008, then-Dean Kagan referred to "a transnational perspective" as being "foundational" as "part of the core of legal thought and activity in this new century." To be clear, she said, "I think the solicitor general's office should offer reasonable foreign law arguments." While she was dean, Harvard Law added "International- Comparative Law" as a course requirement for graduation, but the school dropped the requirement for constitutional law.

We know she believes judges should automatically favor certain classes of people and impose their own values to reach desired outcomes. In short, judges should be super-legislators. We know she believes this because she has written as much. She wrote in 1993 that it is a "thing of glory" for the Supreme Court to see its primary mission as "show[ing] a special solicitude for the despised and disadvantaged." She has acclaimed as her greatest "judicial hero" the radical Israeli judge Aharon Barak, who openly bragged that his "judicial philosophy is enshrined in the recognition that his role is to create rights." Not enforce rights recognized by the people, but create those rights himself. That's dangerous, yet it echoes what Ms. Kagan herself wrote in her Oxford University thesis in 1983, namely that "as participants in public life, judges will have opinions, prejudices, values. Perhaps most important, judges will have goals. ... And because this is so, judges will often try to mold and steer the law in order to promote certain ethical values and achieve certain social ends. Such activity is not necessarily wrong or invalid."

And we know lots of other things about Ms. Kagan. She believes states should be forced to recognize purported marriages performed in other states (presumably such as homosexual "marriage") even if their own policies forbid it. She used her job as legal analyst to make political judgments about how various legal stances would benefit Democrats over Republicans. She supported a policy to allow human embryos to be cloned and killed. She said she "loved" the vicious character assault on Judge Robert Bork when he was nominated for the Supreme Court in 1987. And she once wrote that she hoped for "a new, revitalized, perhaps more leftist left."

If those are Elena Kagan's goals, let her run for elective office. But keep her far away from the nation's highest court, where justices are supposed to serve the law, not create it.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jun/24/the-case-against-kagan/

[Brian4Liberty]

The case against Kagan

That's a pretty good case...

[tangent4ronpaul]

Just before 5pm EST a line of questioning started about the judges Kegan admired... They were all tadical activist judges and very damning! Her expression in reaction to this was PRICELESS! When this hits the C-SPAN archives it needs to be captured and made viral!

-t

[FrankRep]

Elena Kagan: It's Fine If Law Bans Books Because Government Won't Really Enforce It

YouTube - Kagan: its Fine if The Law Bans Books Because Government Won't Really Enforce It (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBqdKKKRrrg&feature=player_embedded)

[Southron]

I think the lack of interest might just be despair.

People may believe if we couldn't stop health care then nothing can be stopped.

[Brian4Liberty]

Elena Kagan: It's Fine If Law Bans Books Because Government Won't Really Enforce It


Kagan seems to believe in "benevolent" dictators.

[silus]

It's an illegal appoinment to the Court since Barry is not Constitutionally qualified to hold the office.

She will be impeached once Barry is removed from office for treason.
Create your own forum and leave this place.

[Brian4Liberty]

Schumer keeps calling her "General Kagan". (No doubt part of her current title.) Says she is the "perfect candidate, straight from central casting". Talk about a double entendre. Insiders are having fun with this...

After watching her testify, it seems she is the perfect candidate. There is a "school of thought" (for lack of a better term) that advocates that one's whole life be a hidden agenda. You convince everyone that you are essentially on their side, that you are their friend. In secret, you constantly work to advance your true hidden agenda. People like this will say that the crowning glory of a life lived in this way is an overflowing funeral where your enemies (who thought of you as their friend) are sincerely lamenting your passing, and afterwords your small, secret circle of true "friends" gathers and recalls how you fooled them all...

[Stop Making Cents]

Create your own forum and leave this place.

Someone forget to change your diaper?

[tangent4ronpaul]

foxnews.com is streaming it live, as should be c-span.org

-t

[haaaylee]

http://www.cspan.org/Watch/C-SPAN3.aspx

[Brian4Liberty]

Lyndsey Graham was on again. It all boiled down to "you will still support us on unlimited detention of terrists won't you?"

[Brian4Liberty]

I smell a funny video from these hearings. A compilation of how many different ways that Kagan can essentially say "I agree". Maybe John Stewart's crew will do it...

[Brian4Liberty]

Paraphrased from a few moments ago:

Q "Does the individual have the right to bear arms?"
A "Based on past rulings, it is settled law, and should be given the same weight as other judicial precedents."

This popular terminology of "settled law" is just a cop out. She doesn't agree that individuals have a right to bear arms, and she will over-rule it given a chance. The "precedent" will be given as much "weight" as she wants to give it, which may be none at all.

[Brian4Liberty]

Just now, while being questioned by Grassley:

Kagan: "Rights need a textual basis in the Constitution...There needs to be a textual basis in the Constitution for any right."

So much for natural rights...

[Sentient Void]

Beck is covering Kagan, and has also pulled up a good number of subjects discussed on this forum such as the commerce clause, banning of books, etc.

Is about to talk about Thomas Paine.

::ducks and covers preparing to be flamed::