Tag Archives: Topic: Nominations

Washington Times editorial: “It’s troubling that Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, is openly considering a favorable vote on the Supreme Court nomination of U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan. The nominee has acted contrary to several matters particularly close to the senator’s core values.”

CNN: “Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, said Tuesday he will support Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination. Graham is the only GOP member of the Senate Judiciary Committee so far to indicate he will vote for Kagan.”

LifeNews: “Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, sent a letter to senators this morning urging them, on behalf of 280,000 women who are members of the organization, to vote no. … ‘The recent revelation of her influence in the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologist’s (ACOG) statement on the medical necessity for partial birth abortion in 1996, arouses deep concern over her objectivity in weighing factual information concerning abortion,’ Dannenfelser said.”

Frank Gaffney writes at Townhall: “Which is where Elena Kagan’s enabling of the penetration of Shariah into our capital markets through the Harvard Law School’s Islamic Finance project comes in.  The purpose of that project is, according to an excellent essay by Andy McCarthy entitled ‘Elena Kagan’s ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ Shariah Policy’ published last week in National Review Online, ‘to promote Shariah compliance in the U.S. financial sector.’”

Deseret News: “I’m convinced,” he said, “that part of (this job) is that when you consider the consequences of the decisions that we make, it does weigh on you and it does show you that there’s something so important that you’ve got to get it right. It does have an effect on you. “(The Supreme Court) truly is a marble palace (because) we’re isolated. We’re isolated from the politics, we’re isolated from the city and in a lot of ways we’re isolated from the country. These trips allow me to come out and see the people who really matter in our government, and that is you all.”

AP: “Sen. Jeff Sessions says Kagan has placed her politics above the law, lacks experience, and has activist judicial heroes.”

USA Today / On Politics: “Former surgeon general C. Everett Koop is urging a no vote on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan in a letter that will be delivered today to senators who soon will be deciding to confirm her. … In the letter, Koop accuses Kagan of lobbying successfully to change the language of a 1997 statement by American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists on a controversial procedure that critics call ‘partial-birth abortion.’”

Gallup: “More Americans want the Senate to vote for rather than against Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court, but the percentage in favor is less than a majority. Support for Kagan’s confirmation remains essentially the same as it was before her June confirmation hearings . . . ”

Blog of the Legal Times: “Caitlin Halligan, a top lawyer in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, may be headed to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.”

Human Events: “Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, met yesterday with Charmaine Yoest, President & CEO of Americans United for Life (AUL) to discuss evidence of Supreme Court Elena Kagan’s central role in defeating a ban on partial-birth abortion . . . ”

“Berwick is the new director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services who has praised British programs that ration care . . . ”

LifeNews: “More members of the Senate are announcing their positions on the nomination of pro-abortion Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme.”

McClatchy DC: “Nearly six months have gone by since Judges Albert Diaz of Charlotte and James Wynn of Raleigh landed on the to-do list of the full U.S. Senate, and still they have not received confirmation votes. Both men are nominated for the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals . . . ”

Mark R. Weaver writes at the NewarkAdvocate.com: “America was founded as a haven for those fleeing government dictates about religion. The First Amendment was crafted as a mighty shield to protect that refuge. So it can only be called ironic that bureaucrats in California, aided by five Supreme Court justices, are wielding that amendment as a mighty sword to undercut the rights of citizens to organize a private campus group according to their beliefs. If Solicitor General Kagan wants to become Justice Kagan, she’d be wise to agree that it’s time to restore some of the balance between the founders’ dual goals of freedom of religion and freedom from religion. The country is already up in arms with the president and the Congress. And when Americans think all three branches of government are untethered from common sense, an uncommon uprising might be in the works.”

Kagan did little to move the nomination hearings from the stylized “farce” (her own word) they have become . . . Kagan did just enough to win my vote by her answers that television would be good for the country and the court, and by identifying Justice Marshall as her role model . . .

LA Times: “In a new ad, the group cites Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s recent vote to uphold a handgun ban. Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee delays its nomination vote a week.”

Political Cortex: “Now that Alabama Senate Republican Jeff Sessions has won a weeklong delay on the final vote to confirm Soliciter General Elena Kagan as a supreme court justice, a right leaning. tea party affiliated organization called Judicial Action Group or Jag, also based in Session’s home state, is reportedly buying up commercial time for a new video ad aimed at swaying three important senate votes to ‘no on Kagan.’ . . . That said, more recently, Jauregu’s JAG has made the opposition of Kagan as a supreme court justice a priority. JAG’s website points visitors to research and analysis by Alliance Defense Fund, American United For Life, Family Research Council and the Aiken Scotus Blog . . .”

LifeNews: “Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan may become one of the more ardent pro-abortion activists on the high court if confirmed, but that may not be enough to stop normally pro-life Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina from supporting her when the Senate Judiciary Committee votes next week.”

LifeNews: “Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan says she will recuse herself from a handful of potential cases that could come before the high court with her on it if the Senate confirms her. However, she has not said she would step down from considering the lawsuit on the pro-abortion health care law President Obama signed.”

Sen. Orring G. Hatch writes at National Review: “After studying Elena Kagan’s record, actively participating in her hearing, and listening to the views of folks in Utah and across the country, I do not believe that she meets the standards we should require of federal judges — especially Supreme Court justices. The first important standard is experience . . . ”

LifeNews: “Republican senators decided today to use the right given under the Senate Judiciary Committee rules that allow any member of the committee to delay a confirmation vote by one week.”

LifeSiteNews: “Performing an ‘end-run’ around the Senate confirmation process, President Barack Obama has installed Dr. Donald Berwick, an enthusiast for medical rationing and an unabashed admirer of the United Kingdom’s socialized health care system, as head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services via a recess appointment.”

Scotus Blog: “Today, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan returned answers to written questions for her submitted after her hearing by Republican Senators Coburn, Cornyn, Graham, Grassley, Kyl, and Sessions . . . ”

SCOTUS Blog: “The weekend began with what is expected to be the last set of documents from Elena Kagan before the vote on her confirmation: the Senate Judiciary Committee released her answers to post-hearing questions submitted by six of the seven Republican Senators . . . ”

The Lonestar Weekly via Sen. John Cornyn: “During the hearing, we learned how Ms. Kagan might approach cases as a Justice. Based on her answers at the hearing, it appears that Ms. Kagan believes that there are virtually no meaningful restraints on Congress’s ability to pass laws under its commerce clause power, and that she is unlikely to rein in an already out-of-control federal government. I was also concerned by her comments on the Second Amendment’s guarantee of an individual’s right to keep and bear arms . . . ”

Blog of the Legal Times: “‘I am so glad that Elena is joining us,’ Ginsburg told an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, according to this dispatch from the Aspen Daily News. Ginsburg was introduced by retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and engaged in a dialogue with journalist and law professor Jeff Rosen.”

LifeNews: “The Washington Times released an editorial column today on the nomination of pro-abortion activist Elena Kagan to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court. The Times says Kagan’s supporting partial-birth abortion (infanticide) should be the “kiss of death” for her nomination.”

Gary Palmer of the Alabama Policy Institute writes: “Activists such as Elena Kagan have an agenda to restrict our natural rights and force us to conform to the dictates of the government. Whether it is gun control, political speech or our right to decide about our own health care, activist federal judges and justices will take these rights from us when they can get a majority of Supreme Court justices who will go along. When Elena Kagan is confirmed, Americans will be just one Supreme Court justice away from losing some fundamental rights. Many voters are paying close attention to the Kagan confirmation process to see if the Republicans will have the will to fight or whether they will be the same party they tossed out of power in the last two elections.”

“The simple fact is that the right of the federal government to define marriage for the purposes of its federal law and federal territories has been clear since the late 19th century, when Congress banned polygamy. Only an incompetent defense could have lost this case.”

WOWT: “Nebraska Senator Mike Johanns has announced he will not support the President’s nomination of Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a news release, the Nebraska Republican described Kagan’s background as alarming, disturbing and troubling.”

LifeNews: “More senators announced their opposition to pro-abortion Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan on Wednesday. The list now includes eight senators who officially oppose Kagan, including Senator John McCain of Arizona who wrote an editorial in USA Today. … Others senators saying they are voting against Kagan include Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia and pro-life Sens. Bob Bennett of Utah, James Inhofe of Oklahoma and Jim DeMint of South Carolina. They join senators who have already announced their opposition, including Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Orrin Hatch of Utah.”

USA Today: “Eight Republican senators who voted in favor of President Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee last year are not yet ready to say what they are going to do about the second. A USA TODAY survey of the Senate offices Wednesday found none of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s Republican supporters ready to commit on Elena Kagan’s lifetime appointment. A Judiciary Committee vote on Kagan’s nomination is likely by July 20, setting the stage for a confirmation vote in the Senate.”

Andrew C. McCarthy writing at National Review Online: “While Kagan was at the law school, her patron, Harvard’s president Larry Summers, accepted a stunning $20 million donation for the creation of a program of studies to lionize Islam’s history and jurisprudence. The cash came from the Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the billionaire investor whose attempted $10 million contribution to the Twin Towers fund had been refused by New York mayor Rudy Giuliani when bin Talal blamed the 9/11 atrocities on American foreign policy. … Yet there were no condemnations from Dean Kagan over the prince’s lavish gift. To the contrary, she proceeded to forge the law school’s ‘Islamic Finance Project.’ Its purpose is to promote sharia compliance in the U.S. financial sector.”

William Saletan writing at Slate: “Elena Kagan doctored a statement by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Conservatives think this should disqualify her from the Supreme Court. They understate the scandal. It isn’t Kagan we should worry about. It’s the whole judiciary. Kagan, who was then an associate White House counsel, was doing her job: advancing the president’s interests. The real culprit was ACOG, which adopted Kagan’s spin without acknowledgment. But the larger problem is the credence subsequently given to ACOG’s statement by courts, including the Supreme Court. Judges have put too much faith in statements from scientific organizations. This credulity must stop.” Via Ross Douthat

Associated Press: “Republican Sen. John McCain says he plans to vote against confirming Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. … McCain says Kagan is unlikely to exercise judicial restraint, based on her decision as dean of Harvard Law School to bar military recruiters from the campus career services office because of the ban on openly gay soldiers.”

Sunshine State News: “The leading Republican candidate in the race for U.S. Senate, former House Speaker Marco Rubio, announced Tuesday that he opposes President Barack Obama’s nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court of the United States. … ‘Initially, my concerns with this nomination centered on her role in implementing the ban on military recruiters while she was dean at Harvard Law School,’ said Rubio. ‘Also, since she has no history as a judge, I hoped the confirmation process would reveal greater insight into her views on the role of judges and the judiciary in America. After all, the proper role of a judge is not to create laws, but to interpret and apply the law within the parameters of our Constitution.’”

Politico: “[T]he GOP has more than just a math problem with Kagan. It has a passion problem — the party, which has used judicial nominations to stoke the culture wars for more than a decade, appears to have lost its edge on judges. … some Republicans griped privately over what they saw as Sessions’s largely unfocused attacks, which failed to provide a compelling counternarrative about her nomination. … After denouncing the filibusters Democrats used against George W. Bush’s nominees, including an unsuccessful attempt with Associate Justice Samuel Alito and successful filibusters to prevent conservative icon Miguel Estrada from becoming a federal judge, top Republicans don’t now want to look like hypocrites.”

The Salk Lake Tribune: “While Kagan, a Democrat, has faced the greatest scrutiny on her views of abortion and gay rights, some atheist, agnostic and secularist groups aren’t convinced she is the best choice for the court. Part of the reason: She is poised to replace Justice John Paul Stevens, one of the court’s strongest voices for a strict separation of church and state.”

Shannen Coffin writing at National Review Online / The Corner: “Elena Kagan’s explanation of her involvement in editing ACOG’s statement of policy on the abortion method was that she was merely helping ACOG put into words what they had been expressing all along in meetings with the White House. … The White House clearly meddled in the deliberations of a supposedly (but clearly not) nonpartisan medical association on a key issue of medical fact. Whether or not ACOG had ever expressed the views that Kagan put into words — and there are reasons to question that assertion — the White House crossed a line in pushing the medical debate. It politicized science — a charge that is thrown around frequently by Democrats, and practice that is used more frequently by them.” | Related: Coffin’s original article: Kagan’s abortion distortion

Breitbart: “Republican Leader Mitch McConnell saying that he wasn’t sure she could ‘constrain the ardent political advocacy that has marked much of her adult life.’ … One member of the committee, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, announced Friday that he would be voting against Kagan, despite his approval of her as solicitor general last year. … Hatch’s announcement was soon followed by similar statements from McConnell and GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.”

“Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has scheduled a committee vote for Tuesday, July 13, according to a notice sent to reporters this afternoon.”

FRC Blog: “‘As has been pointed out while Dean of the law school she defied the requirements of a federal law, known as the Solomon Amendment. Her violation of this federal law was motivated by her vehement opposition to the military’s prohibition against open homosexuality.’”

An excerpt from the conclusion of Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith’s written testimony in support of Elena Kagan’s nomination to the US Supreme Court, via Jonathan H. Adler at The Volokh Conspiracy (see also the post’s lively comments section): “The President of the United States is entitled to choose a judicial nominee whom he believes reflects his judicial philosophy; and his decision to nominate a highly qualified individual who swims in the broad mainstream of American legal life – a description that Kagan easily satisfies – warrants deference from the Senate. Some Democratic members of this Committee implicitly or expressly embrace this principle today but did not do so during the hearings for Justices Roberts and Alito. Some Republican members of this Committee implicitly or expressly embraced this principle during the hearings for Justices Roberts and Alito, but not today. The Democrats are right now and the Republicans were right then. But the opportunistic embrace of the principle, and the often-extremely-uncharitable characterization of the records of nominees of presidents of the opposite party, can only mean that neither side really believes in it.”

Floyd and Mary Beth Brown write at Townhall: “Elena Kagan is a radical. Barack Obama and his allies in the left-wing media have made every attempt to paint Kagan as a ‘moderate,’ but this truth is evident if you listen to her answers. She has a life-long history of extreme and radical left-wing political activism and her personal history clearly indicates that she will not hesitate to pursue Obama’s far-left wing agenda from the bench.”

Wall Street Journal editorial: “Reconfirming John Roberts” – full text via Google News: “Pardon us for asking, but was that really Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing this week? We’re double checking because Senate Democrats seemed preoccupied with refighting the 2005 nomination of Chief Justice John Roberts. … The list of Democrats who devoted a chunk of their camera time to deplore the Chief included [Franken,] Patrick Leahy, Sheldon Whitehouse, Ben Cardin and Chuck Schumer, rather like a political campaign.”

The Hill: “Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s confirmation vote sets up a difficult political decision for a half-dozen or so Republicans. … Republican senators will be under heavy pressure to vote against President Barack Obama’s second nominee to the Supreme Court in an election year characterized by an angry electorate fed up with incumbents.”

SCOTUSblog: “SCOTUSblog is offering live coverage of the fourth day of Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The session was expected to begin promptly at 4:00 p.m Eastern, but may begin a bit late. For the first three days we also offered a video feed from PBS’s NewsHour, but that coverage ended yesterday.”

Carson Holloway writing at Public Discourse: “This updated living constitutionalism, however, is even less compatible with a judge’s duty than the old, a problem left largely unexplored by Kagan’s Republican critics on the Senate Judiciary Committee. … In some recently reported and widely defended comments, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has gone much further, suggesting that judges may properly be guided by their own values in deciding cases. … In a 1995 review of Stephen Carter’s The Confirmation Mess, Kagan approvingly quoted Carter’s claim that ‘the interpreter’s own experience and values become the most important data’ at a ‘crucial moment’ that arises in most cases heard by the Supreme Court. Then, speaking clearly for herself, Kagan adds that ‘it should come as no surprise by now that many of the votes a Supreme Court justice casts have little to do with technical legal ability and much to do with conceptions of value.’”

Christianity Today (see page 2): “[Gregory Baylor] of the Alliance Defense Fund said the constitutional issues at stake are still up for debate. ‘The conflict still exists,’ said Baylor. ‘The Hastings policy actually requires CLS to allow atheists to lead its Bible studies and the College Democrats to accept the election of Republican officers in order for the groups to be recognized on campus. We agree with Justice [Samuel] Alito in his dissent that the Court should have rejected this as absurd.’”

“In his opening statement on Monday, Sen. Kyl said that he did not see how Kagan could get a ‘well qualified’ rating when she, in his view, lacks the requisite experience in the practice of law.”

“‘The law must control the judge; the judge must not control the law,’ Hatch said. ‘I have concluded that, based on evidence rather than blind faith, General Kagan regrettably does not meet this standard . . . ‘”

Wall Street Journal / Washington Wire: “After the Supreme Court’s Monday decision extending gun rights nationwide, the Second Amendment front moved to the Senate, where the National Rifle Association and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence squared off over Elena Kagan, President Barack Obama’s nominee to succeed retired Justice John Paul Stevens.”

Human Rights Campaign Press Release: “Elena Kagan’s record indicates she may be more familiar with how laws and policies affect the LGBT community than any individual previously nominated to serve on the Supreme Court.”

ADF Attorney Casey Mattox writing at The Christian Post / Advancing Religious Liberty: “The predictions of those, including Elena Kagan, who said banning partial-birth abortion would result in harm to women have not come true. Three years of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act has resulted in more than 7,000 partial birth abortions that have NOT been performed and zero proof that this has harmed women’s health. Kagan’s claim, in her revision of the position statement of a leading pro-abortion medical group, has been proven false.”

“Charles Grassley (R-IA) asked, ‘Do you believe that marriage is a question reserved for the states to decide?’ This question, Kagan pointed out, was the subject of a high-profile suit now in the courts, making comment improper. Then Grassley asked whether she considered a 1970 case on the issue, Baker v. Nelson ‘settled law.’”

National Right to Life News: “What we know for sure is, as NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson once put it, ‘The bottom line is that thousands of additional babies were mostly delivered alive and then stabbed through the back of the head, thanks to the deceptive but successful political strategy, to which Elena Kagan lent all of her considerable talents, that blocked the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act from becoming law during the Clinton Administration.’ In slip-sliding around her real role, Kagan is demonstrating the very qualities that make her critics nervous: a political adroitness at fudging her true role in providing political cover for pro-abortion Democrats.”

Maggie Gallagher writing at Townhall: “How can you spot a legal progressive? A legal progressive is someone who believes rights that are not stated in the Constitution, but inferred or extrapolated, should be given more weight than rights plainly enumerated.”

“My question for Ms. Kagan is this: What’s your standard? By what standard is [DADT] ‘a moral injustice of the first order’ and abortion a moral right?”

Heritage Foundation / The Foundry: “Kagan has now testified that not only does she find the Founders’ concept of “unalienable Rights” irrelevant to Constitutional interpretation, but she also declined to say if the Constitution prevents Congress from telling Americans what to eat. Her evasive non-response to Coburn’s Commerce Clause inquiry shows that she would indeed be a rubber-stamp for almost any part of the Obama agenda that Congress enacts.”

BusinessWeek: “Elena Kagan contrasted herself with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican appointees as she finished her Senate testimony, saying judges aren’t “robotic” umpires and must interpret the Constitution with an eye toward changing conditions. … ‘The Constitution does not change, but the court must apply it to changing conditions,’ said Kagan . . .”

Blog of LegalTimes: “‘You have followed the pattern which has been in vogue since Bork,’ he said, referring to conventional wisdom that Supreme Court nominees have been hesitant to say much about their legal views after the nomination of the very substantive Judge Robert Bork failed in 1987. ‘It would be my hope that we could find some place between voting no and having some sort of substantive answers, but I don’t know that it would be useful to continue these questions any further.’”

New York Times: “Republicans on Wednesday stepped up their pressure on Elena Kagan to defend her decisions involving abortion and the ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military, trying to knock her off her stride even as some of them conceded that her confirmation to the Supreme Court appears all but assured.”

Washington Post: “‘Solicitor General Kagan will be confirmed,’ Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the panel chairman, confidently declared during a break in the hearings.”

Baptist Press: “Without saying how she would rule on any specific church-state case, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan said Wednesday that governments should have some freedom ‘to make religious accommodations’ in matters involving the Constitution’s Establishment Clause.”

Human Events liveblog of the Kagan hearings is here. Contributors include Mary Harned and Dr. Charmaine Yoest of Americans United for Life (AUL is also covering the hearings at its own blog).

New York Times: “Ms. Kagan’s responses, during a long and sometimes tense day of parrying with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, were similar to those of Supreme Court nominees past. But unlike her predecessors, Ms. Kagan wrote a 1995 article calling for judicial nominees to be more forthcoming. On Tuesday, minutes into her testimony, she backpedaled, saying she now believed it would be inappropriate even to answer questions that might ‘provide some kind of hints’ about her views on matters of legal controversy.”

SCOTUSblog: “Partnering with PBS NewsHour, SCOTUSblog is again offering live coverage of Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings before the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Both the NewsHour live video of the event, and our live-blogging narrative and commentary, will appear below. The session is expected to begin promptly at 9:00 a.m. Eastern.”

Townhall: “Although the Bork inquisition was a largely partisan affair, the consequences have yielded a bipartisan sham. Republican and Democratic nominees alike are trained to say as little as possible and to stay a razor’s width on the side of truthfulness. … And that’s why Kagan should be the hero of this tale. She has vociferously argued that the ‘Bork hearings were great … the best thing that ever happened to constitutional democracy.’ … Alas, it doesn’t look like Kagan will be following the Kagan standard.”

Jonathan Adler writes at the Volokh Conspiracy: “Was ‘language purporting to be the judgment of an independent body of medical experts devoted to the care and treatment of pregnant women and their children’ actually ‘nothing more than the political scrawling’ of then Clinton White House staffer Elena Kagan . . . Powerline’s John Hinderaker thinks this is a ‘smoking gun’ and Kagan ‘has a great deal of explaining to do.’ Glenn Reynolds thinks this is ‘at least’ a scandal for ACOG, if not Kagan herself. If the allegations are true, it’s a clear example of the politicization of science by a Democratic administration (and further evidence that there are no clean hands on science politicization) . . . ”

Phyllis Schlafly writing at Investor’s Business Daily: “Now that Obama is president, he has the power to nominate Supreme Court justices who will ‘break free’ from the Constitution and join him in ‘fundamentally transforming’ America. That’s the essence of his choice of Elena Kagan as his second Supreme Court nominee. She never was a judge, and her paper trail is short. But it’s long enough to prove that she is a clear and present danger to the Constitution.”

“Ominously, Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined the Breyer dissent – contradicting what she told the U.S. Senate and the American people last summer.”

The video is here.

SCOTUSblog has “linked to the prepared statements provided by several members of the Senate Judiciary Committee following today’s session of Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings. Additionally, Kagan’s prepared statement is available here.”

Blog of LegalTimes: “‘Senator Kyl, I think it’s law all the way down,’ she said. ‘The question is what the law requires. Now, there are cases where it is difficult to determine what the law requires. Judging is not a robotic or automatic enterprise, especially on cases that come before the Supreme Court…. But it’s law all the way down, regardless.’”

ChristianNewsWire: “While serving as Dean of Harvard Law School, Kagan’s administration demanded and forced Blue-Cross, Blue-Shield to cover sex-change operations as an ‘equal right’ paid benefit, harming gender-confused students, as confirmed in 2006 and 2008 by Harvard Crimson newspaper articles.”