Kagan repudiated her famous 1995 article calling for substantive hearings at which Supreme Court nominees testify openly and in detail about their judicial philosophy and view of cases. Senator Herbert Kohl said openly that the Senate has less evidence of Kagan's judicial philosophy than with any prior Supreme Court nominee who testified. Asked if she is a "legal progressive" Kagan denied knowing what the label means; but she called herself a "political progressive." So, we are asked to believe that activist political liberal Kagan knows what a political progressive is, but that activist lawyer Kagan, having risen to be the government's chief lawyer before the Supreme Court (Solicitor-General), does NOT know what a legal progressive is.
But Kagan's answer to Senator Tom Coburn re food consumption regulation (1:19) is revealing indeed. She refused to state that if Congress passed a law requiring everyone to eat veggies & fruit thrice daily, it would violate the Commerce Clause, which empowers the federal government to regulate interstate commerce. This signals that she will vote to uphold ObamaCare, which stretches the Commerce Clause to encompass private patient - physician relationships.
Kagan would join a Court that, the NY Times reports, now has the personal stamp of the Chief Justice on it. Whereas at first the Roberts Court was called the Kennedy Court because swing vote Anthony Kennedy sided with either the four liberals or the four conservatives, this term Roberts created more 6-3 majorities instead of 5-4, and moved the Court to the right on campaign finance, gun rights & criminal procedure. Roberts was in the majority 92 percent of the time, tops among the nine. As for Kagan, the Gray Lady reports that she would replace in John Paul Stevens someone probably less liberal on business cases than she, but someone who was the intellectual leader of the liberal bloc--a hard act for Kagan to follow.
Bottom Line. That Supreme Court nominees are less than fully candid about their views may be a prerequisite of getting confirmed these days, absent a filibuster-proof Senate majority. But some elementary standard of honesty must be met. Kagan is failing this. Claiming she does not know what a legal progressive is, does not amount to being merely coy. It is, plain and simple, a LIE. Even someone not a legal progressive knows what it is, at Kagan's level in the legal profession. Putting a LIAR on the Court is not a good idea, ever.
Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, Supreme Court, Conservative Politics
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