A dangerous nominee

Nominated by a president whose party controls both houses of Congress, Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s “confirmation hearings” for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court are largely a formality.

Nonetheless, the nominee’s well-coached insistence on pathetically bland non-answers has been so exasperating — and insulting — that she might as well have placed a video monitor on the witness table, programmed to respond to each question: “I will do my best to be honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring …” and, of course, to “use resources wisely.”

This is unfortunate, since — while the hearings have been bland — Ms. Kagan is not, and the American people deserve to know more about the characters to whom President Obama is offering a lifetime seat on the nation’s highest court.

When the hearings began, ranking Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions offered a devastating opening statement — though it received little press coverage — “documenting Kagan’s extreme liberalism,” reports Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center.

“He ran through her college thesis that worried about socialism’s demise, and her master’s thesis praising the activism of the Earl Warren court. He noted how she worked for the Michael Dukakis for President campaign, and took a leave as a law school professor to help Joe Biden get liberal Justice Ruth Ginsburg confirmed.”

Yet the East Coast media report that a search to determine her political leanings has proved “elusive”?

Nominee Kagan’s statement in her signed brief for the animal cruelty case U.S. v. Stevens that “Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs” was and is, as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in rejecting the argument for the high court, “startling and dangerous.”

On Second Amendment rights, Curt Levy, executive director of the Committee for Justice, reported after reviewing the Clinton Library’s release of Elena Kagan documents last week (other than the 1,500 pages withheld, that is): “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 … and even the fundamental question of whether individuals have any Second Amendment rights. It is no wonder that Bill Clinton, the most pro-gun-control president in American history, put Kagan in charge of gun policy.”

No wonder the NRA finally came out in opposition to the Kagan nomination last week (despite a weeks-long “gag order” on their board members discussing the troll), warning — especially after previous Obama appointee Sonia Sotomayor lied about honoring gun rights in her own hearings last year — that “Ms. Kagan’s record on the Second Amendment gives us no confidence that if confirmed to the Court, she will faithfully defend the fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms of law-abiding Americans.”

Will even Nevada’s Harry Reid, currently behind in re-election polls, vote for this gun-grabber, placing far-left orthodoxy ahead of his cherished NRA rating and endorsement? Or will the NRA — in truth the nation’s largest gun-control organization — endorse Dirty Harry despite a vote for Kagan, rewarding him for the $61 million federal pork grant which recently built Clark County a new public shooting range, where locals stupid enough to fall for the scam now go to shoot under government supervision, even as Mr. Reid and company systematically rule all the remaining swatches of vacant Nevada desert “off limits” to unsupervised recreational target practice?

(Gun Owners of America have endorsed Republican Sharron Angle, who really carries a handgun. Interesting contrast.)

Why have the national media provided such minimal coverage of these well-established Kagan positions, while they work themselves into a frenzy asking “gotcha” questions in attempts to discredit such conservative women as Sarah Palin of Alaska and Nevada’s own Sharron Angle?

A Kagan court would enforce few limits to a government-imposed nanny state. The nominee was asked by Sen. Tom Coburn “If I wanted to sponsor a bill and it said Americans, you have to eat three vegetables and three fruits every day and I got it through Congress and that’s now the law of the land, got to do it, does that violate the commerce clause?”

“Sounds like a dumb law,” Kagan replied. “But I think that the question of whether it’s a dumb law is different from the question of whether it’s constitutional, and I think that courts would be wrong to strike down laws that they think are senseless just because they’re senseless.”

Ms. Kagan ducked the question, of course, which is whether she as a justice would find such a law justified under the commerce clause. She later rallied to say such an edict might be disallowed if it didn’t deal with “economic activity.” But of course requiring every American to eat an apple a day could be justified as benefiting the apple growers — just as Obamacare is now justified (albeit fraudulently) as a means to “reduce the collective costs of health care.”

The plain point is that a Justice Kagan would enforce hardly any limits to federal meddling in our lives.

Barack Obama “revealed his goal for the Supreme Court when he complained on Chicago radio station WBEZ-FM in 2001 that the Earl Warren Court wasn’t ‘radical’ enough because ‘it didn’t break free from the essential constraints placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution’ in order to allow ‘redistribution of wealth,’” columnist Phyllis Schlafly reported this week.

When Ms. Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School, she presented a guest speaker who “is known as the most activist judge in the world: Judge Aharon Barak, formerly president of the Israeli Supreme Court,” Ms. Schlafly reports. Mr. Barak has written that a judge should “make” and “create” law, assume “a role in the legislative process,” and give statutes “new meaning that suits new social needs.”

Mr. Barak writes that a judge “is subject to no authority” except himself, and he “must sometimes depart the confines of his legal system and channel into it fundamental values not yet found in it.”

This is a far cry from traditional American jurisprudence. Yet Ms. Schlafly reports that Ms. Kagan described Judge Barak to her students as her “judicial hero.”

Judge Robert Bork calls Ms. Kagan’s praise of Barak “disqualifying in and of itself.”

Before she’s granted a lifetime appointment to fundamentally change 200 years of respect for the written law in the United States, will no senator ask Ms. Kagan whether she agrees with these power-mad positions of her “judicial hero”?

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