Tag Archives: Topic: Nominations

CNSNews: “Despite a resolution by Congress authorizing war against those responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President Obama’s nominee to be the number two official at the Justice Department, James Cole, wrote an op-ed in 2002 likening the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to the domestic crimes of murder, rape and child abuse, while arguing that the attackers ought to be treated like domestic criminals.”

Wall Street Journal: “Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, as a White House lawyer in the 1990s, played a role in President Bill Clinton’s efforts to stall a sexual-harassment lawsuit stemming from his time as Arkansas governor. Ms. Kagan’s role in fighting the suit is one of dozens of issues covered in documents released Friday by the William J. Clinton Presidential Library . . . ”

Rob Schwarzwalder writing at the FRC blog: “In an op-ed in today’s Washington Post (‘Restoring Leadership and Integrity to the Office of Legal Counsel‘), President Obama’s former nominee to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel Dawn Johnsen writes that ‘There is no simple answer to why my nomination failed’ . . . Ms. Johnsen is a pro-abortion zealot, and a sufficient number of pro-life Senators found her views outside the mainstream that she finally gave up her more than 14 month effort to achieve Senate confirmation.”

AP: “Bill Clinton’s presidential library is keeping secret memos and notes Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan wrote in connection with the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit . . . ”

New York Times: “As a young White House lawyer, Elena Kagan wrote that it was ‘quite outrageous’ for the government to force a landlord to rent an apartment to an unwed couple if doing so violated the landlord’s religious beliefs against cohabitation outside the bonds of marriage.”

WhiteHouse.gov: “James E. Graves, Jr. is a distinguished and experienced Mississippi jurist, who was an attorney in private practice and public service before taking the bench. The only African-American currently serving on the Mississippi Supreme Court, Justice Graves takes a keen interest in the administration of his state’s court system, and has been active in national, state and local bar associations. ”

Boston Globe: “Two senior Republican senators criticized Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan Thursday for memos she wrote as a young law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, saying the papers suggest she lets politics dictate her legal decisions.”

LifeNews: “Add human cloning to abortion and assisted suicide as practices pro-life groups oppose but Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan supports. Files released from the Clinton library about Kagan’s time in the Clinton administration show her advocating cloning humans for dubious research.”

Law.com: The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 11-7 today to advance the nomination of Judge Robert Chatigny for the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. All but one Democrat voted for the nomination and all Republicans against it, similar to the committee’s May 13 vote on the nomination of Goodwin Liu for the 9th Circuit. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., voted ‘pass’ on Chatigny but did not explain her vote. Both nominations are likely to be drawn-out fights on the Senate floor.

Penny Nance of CWA writes at the Washington Times: “Our president, Barack Obama, has decided that a man who actively empathizes with serial killers and rapists, sex offenders and child pornographers should be given a promotion to a lifetime job. Robert Chatigny, a U.S. District judge in Connecticut, has been nominated by Mr. Obama to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, a bench position that has led other judges right up the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Washington Times: “When Ms. Kagan served as Mr. Clinton’s deputy domestic policy adviser, she was a feverish proponent of gun control. From gunlock mandates to gun-show regulations, she was instrumental in pushing anti-gun policies, according to the Los Angeles Times.”

LifeNews: “A memo the Clinton presidential library turned out last week showing Elena Kagan opposed a ban on assisted suicide gave pro-life groups even more reason to oppose her nomination.”

Blog of the Legal Times: “Former acting solicitor general Walter Dellinger said today that Elena Kagan’s work for civil rights and Democratic icons should alleviate any concerns about her among liberals . . . ”

Blog of Legal Times: “Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has scheduled a June 15 confirmation hearing for James Cole, nominated for deputy attorney general . . . ”

LifeNews: “The slew of legal memos released by the Clinton presidential library provide enough proof to show Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is radically pro-abortion. But a law review article she wrote over a decade ago yield . . . ”

Wall Street Journal: “The dustup concerns a nominee named Jack McConnell (pictured), a plaintiffs’ lawyer at Motley Rice up in Rhode Island. Earlier this spring, President Obama nominated McConnell to a seat on the federal bench for the District of Rhode Island. It didn’t take long for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to throw up a red flag on McConnell, citing two main points: that he will make between $2.5 million and $3.1 million every year though 2024 in deferred pay for his legal work, which partly derives from his participation in the $264-billion settlement reached between states and tobacco firms in 1998 . . . ”

Blog of the Legal Times: “The U.S. Senate is set to vote late Monday on the confirmation of three nominees for federal district court — the chamber’s first order of business after a week-long recess.”

Life News: “Last week, a legal memo Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan authored during her time as a law clerk for pro-abortion Justice Thurgood Marshall received new attention.”

UPI: “Middle-of-the-road Republicans on Capitol Hill already have been whispering sweet nothings about Kagan, the first woman U.S. solicitor general, into reporters’ ears for days. For now, most of her critics seem to be playing soft ball . . . ”

Ed Whelan writes at National Review: In sum, Kagan, in an exercise of cheap moral posturing, elevated her ideological commitment on gay rights above what Congress, acting on the advice of military leaders, had determined best served the interests of national security. She directed her verbal fire entirely at the military, not at the politicians who in fact bore ultimate responsibility for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. In the midst of war, she violated federal law by treating military recruiters worse than she treated the elite law firms that were donating their legal services to anti-American terrorists and suspected terrorists. As Peter Beinart, the liberal former editor of The New Republic, has put it, barring military recruiters from the jobs office amounted to “a statement of national estrangement,” of Kagan’s “alienating [her]self from the country.”

But we are gravely concerned about a more subtle message Kagan’s nomination is sending to the people of the United States: a return to feudalism in American law . . . America was founded as a rejection of feudalism . . .

CNSNews: “As a domestic policy adviser in the Clinton White House, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan wrote that encouraging a new federal law banning assisted suicide would be ‘a fairly terrible idea.’”

Wall Street Journal (AP): “The William J. Clinton Presidential Library on Friday released the first batch of 160,000 pages of records from Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s service in the former president’s White House.”

Associated Press: “As an aide to former President Bill Clinton, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan took a pragmatic approach to negotiating tobacco regulations with Republicans and worried that tough marketing restrictions might be unconstitutional, according to files handed over to Congress Friday.”

The Blog of LegalTimes: “The American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary is well into its in-depth investigation into the record of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, which will be presented to the Senate Judiciary Committee for its hearing later this month.”

Gallup: “A USA Today/Gallup poll finds just under half of Americans, 46%, in favor of the Senate’s confirming Elena Kagan’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. That level of support is generally lower than what Gallup has found when it first polled about other recent court nominations, trailing all others except Harriet Miers and Robert Bork.”

SCOTUSblog Friday round-up: “Following a flurry of articles on this week’s opinions, Court commentators have turned their attention back to Elena Kagan’s upcoming confirmation hearings, parsing her records for clues to her judicial philosophy.”

CBS: “[I]n documents obtained by CBS News, Kagan–while working as a law clerk to the late Justice Thurgood Marshall – made her positions clear on some of the nation’s most contentious social issues.”

New York Personal Injury Law Blog: “And it turns out, while at the BigLaw firm of Williams & Connolly between 1989 and 1991, Kagan actually did some First Amendment work that was interesting. In fact, of the 10 ‘most significant litigated matters which you personally handled’ that the the Senate Judiciary Committee asked her to list, five had to do with the First Amendment. And, despite being a very junior associate, she was actually given the chance to argue a couple of times in court . . . So here is Elena Kagan’s Top 10 List of private cases.”

Associated Press: “White House Counsel Bob Bauer said a Clinton aide is reviewing Kagan’s files from her stint in his administration to see whether any of the 160,000-page trove of records held at the Clinton presidential library should be kept secret.”

Stewart Baker reports on the law in question and the filing at the Volokh Conspiracy.

AP: “Researchers at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library are working overtime to produce more than 160,000 pages of documents – some of them possibly holding clues to the record of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.”

Bloomberg: “Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine and Richard Lugar of Indiana are among the Republicans praising her.”

AP: “Bio looks like this: raised in a middle-class Jewish family in Manhattan. Two brothers. Mother taught school. Dad was a lawyer. Look closer, and you’ll find a family tree richly populated with individuals of great determination, intelligence and activism. There’s even a bona fide tree-hugger and a leftist dissident in the lot.”

Washinton Post: “Kagan was pursuing two courses at once: While staking out a tough stance against the recruiting, because of the military’s ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly, she simultaneously maneuvered to facilitate it behind the scenes. Those watching her up close were divided over whether she was hedging on hard choices or simply trying not to antagonize rival campus factions.”

Keen News Service: “The Senate Judiciary Committee today (Thursday, May 27) recommended the nomination of openly gay Laura Duffy as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California. If confirmed by the full Senate, she would become the second openly lesbian or gay U.S. attorney. Jenny Durkan, the first, was confirmed in September as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington . . . ”

Medical News Today: “Memos pertaining to abortion cases that Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan authored during her yearlong clerkship for former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall could become an issue during her confirmation hearings, the AP/Boston Globe reports. ”

Lisa A. Rickard writes at Townhall: “Since it was founded 12 years ago, the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform (ILR) has never opposed anyone nominated for a federal district court judgeship. That changed this month, when the chamber joined with other business organizations in recommending to the Senate Judiciary Committee that it reject the nomination of John J. “Jack” McConnell to serve a lifetime appointment on the U.S. District Court for Rhode Island . . . Instead, we are opposing Mr. McConnell because he has demonstrated unsound legal judgment and has a history of strong personal anti-business bias.”

AP: “O’Connor said that more than a third of all justices came to the court without first serving as a judge . . . Justice Antonin Scalia also says no judicial experience is necessary.”

Washington Times: “Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court should founder unless she adequately explains why she quite literally put ‘International/ Comparative Law’ ahead of the U.S. Constitution. Senators should question Ms. Kagan in great depth about her views on the applicability of foreign law in American courts.”

Blog of the Legal Times: “But it was a former Harvard Federalist Society president, now a Republican political consultant, who captured most of the spotlight. Sarah Isgur, a 2008 graduate of the law school, had high praise for Kagan’s assistance in ‘helping me get the Federalist Society to the level I felt was needed.’ According to Isgur, Kagan encouraged the conservative student group to give an award that would bring conservative leaders to campus so students could interact with them and build relationships.”

Tampa Bay Online (AP): “As a young lawyer working for Justice Thurgood Marshall, Elena Kagan repeatedly expressed her concern that a conservative Supreme Court was looking for ways to cut back on the rights of women, criminal defendants and prisoners.”

Richard L. Hasen writes at Slate: “Her own academic writings show she is deeply concerned about incumbents passing laws to protect themselves from competition, and she could well end up agreeing with Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas that limits on campaign spending by corporations are unconstitutional.”

How Appealing links to a couple of reports on Kagan including this link to her report card at the NY Times.

USA Today: “Meanwhile, an anti-abortion group, Americans United for Life, is calling Kagan’s record on abortion “problematic.” The group contends it has found evidence that leads it to believe she would issue “decisions like Roe v. Wade,” the 1973 Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal nationwide . . . ”

“But the bigger problem conservatives see is that the pro-Kagan statements put Republicans at a disadvantage before the confirmation even begins.”

‘We’re heading to what could be a train wreck,’ Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama said.

U.S. News & World Report: “One of the nation’s most prominent anti-abortion groups is seeking a delay in the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan in order to provide the Clinton library time to find and make public her key writings while a White House lawyer and later domestic policy aide.”

Wall Street Journal Law Blog: “The Senate Judiciary Committee has posted Kagan’s handwritten notes for the speech here. (Turn to page 83 for the first page of the notes) . . . The piece, in short, seems to suggest that in at least one key area, she would be an arbiter of judicial restraint, prone to giving considerable deference to acts of Congress.”

Wall Street Journal | Washington Wire: “After four years of White House service, how many pages of documents and emails could Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan have left behind that congressional aides, reporters and interested others will be combing through? Brace yourself: About 168,000 pages.” Via How Appealing.

Associated Press: “Justice Antonin Scalia says Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has at least two friends on the high court: Scalia and Justice Stephen Breyer.”

Blog of the Legal Times: “President Barack Obama has decided to nominate Susan Carney, who spent two decades as a Washington lawyer before going to work for Yale University, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, the White House said today.”

LifeSiteNews: ” The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has pulled out of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights . . . The release stated that the bishops withdrew following the group’s published support for the pro-abortion and homosexualist Supreme Court nominee, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, which was pointed out earlier this week by Deal Hudson of Catholic Advocate and reported by LSN Tuesday.”

“Kagan made a maximum ($500) campaign contribution to John Bonifaz, who was running in the Democratic primary campaign for Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and that donation cause Richmond particular concern.”

AP: “Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, asked whether Republicans could support Kagan, said the nominee ‘certainly has the qualifications, and certainly has, I think, the balance in her approach – at least so far – but I’d like to wait and see.’”

LA Times: “The Judiciary Committee asks for letters, memos, e-mails and more, before hearings on the Supreme Court nominee begin June 28. A library official says meeting the deadline would be ‘very difficult.’”

AP: “Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan counted the days like a nervous student anticipating a tough oral exam before she made her first appearance last year at the court she’s now seeking to join.”

The Hill: “Elena Kagan’s hearing for Supreme Court confirmation is scheduled to begin June 28, according to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).”

Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Peter Baker write at the NY Times:  ”As a young graduate student, Elena Kagan wrote that it was ‘not necessarily wrong or invalid’ for judges to ‘try to mold and steer the law’ to achieve social ends, but warned that such rulings must be rooted in legal principles to be accepted by society and endure.”

AP: “The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman moved quickly Wednesday to advance Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan down a so-far smooth road to confirmation, setting hearings for June 28.”

Blog of the Legal Times: “Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s answers to a background questionnaire have arrived on Capitol Hill. Click here to download a copy.”

NPR: The cheerful, charming Kagan so beloved by the students was not always in evidence elsewhere. Secretaries and faculty members alike have stories of Kagan screaming at people, slamming doors and chewing out subordinates in public — a trait that she is said to have carried with her to her next job as solicitor general. She’s a “yeller,” concedes one of her friends with a wry smile. (Law professor Mark) Tushnet, one of her admirers, puts it this way: “Her weakness as dean was that she really didn’t like people to disagree with her. But that’s not something you can do at the Supreme Court.”

LA Times: “Sullivan, writing for theAtlantic.com, argues it would ‘be bizarre to argue that a justice’s sexual orientation will not in some way affect his or her judgment’ on issues likely to come before the court, presumably such as same-sex marriage. The questions about Kagan arise, Sullivan wrote, because ‘we have been told by many that she is gay.’”

Life News: “Further analysis of the controversial memo Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan wrote for ex-President Bill Clinton on the subject of partial-birth abortion provides new concerns for pro-life advocates. It shows she regarded the ban on the abortion procedure as unconstitutional.”

Jan LaRue writes at the American Thinker: Compare the qualifications for becoming an MLB ump with Kagan’s qualifications for the Court . . .

ADF attorney Jordan Lorence appeared with ADF attorney David French, who served as the guest host of Reality Check Live.  They discuss the U.S. Supreme Court and the nomination of Elena Kagan. | MP3 43:51 mins | Posts related to the Kagan nomination through ADF Alliance Alert compound tag: Topic: Nominations + Court: US Supreme

Christian Science Monitor: “Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan lacks a paper trail. But her Senate confirmation hearing last year for solicitor general offers a preview of what’s to come.”

Marcia Coyle writes at the National Law Journal: “President Barack Obama last week presented U.S. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan as one of the nation’s ‘foremost legal minds.’ But is the former Harvard Law dean actually scholar-lite? Some academic and political commentators questioned her slim body of scholarship given her 14 years in academia — eight as a teacher and nearly six as dean . . . ”

Selma Times-Journal: “‘Ms. Kagan’s lack of judicial experience and short time as solicitor general, arguing just six cases before the court is troubling,’ Sessions said in the statement. ‘The public expects Supreme Court nominees to possess a mastery of the …

David Bernstein writes at the Volokh Conpsiracy: “. . . even at the most elite law schools (and unlike at elite private undergrads, where ‘exciting’ applicants do get a significant leg up), admission for 80+% of students is primarily, in most cases almost exclusively, based on LSATs and GPAs . . . ”

Related posts

Carol Platt Liebau writes at Townhall: “So what explains the fact that only now are Republicans starting to oppose Democrat nominees with the same political vigor that’s long characterized the Democrats’ response to Republican presidents? Part of it may be because Republicans have finally realized that if all their presidents’ nominees are labeled as ‘extremists’ and dragged through the mud – yet they themselves continue to tip their hats and nod politely to left-of-center nominees – the result will be a definition of ‘mainstream’ jurisprudence that falls ever farther to the left on the political continuum. But there’s more to it than that . . . ”

“Once Kagan gets on the court, she will answer to nobody for the rest of her life. Better get some answers now, then, don’t you think? Or does that too ‘have no place’ in such a process?”

AP: “Kagan isn’t revealing much as she plods through a painstaking series of Capitol Hill meetings with the senators whose backing she needs for confirmation. But the 50-year-old solicitor general – who’s never been a judge – has weighed in cautiously on several issues as she strives to paint a fuller picture of what kind of a justice she might be . . . ”

AP: “Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Senate’s Republican whip, said Sunday that he doesn’t see the GOP employing a filibuster against Kagan, who was nominated for the high court by President Barack Obama . . . ”

Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, writing in the Washington Post: “The gatekeeper power of such institutions is why it was so important to desegregate them (using affirmative action, among other tools) and why virtually all leaders of great universities talk about diversity and access. For about 40 years now, all the top law schools have tried to pick students who are not just brilliant but who have the potential to be outstanding leaders from and for all of America’s communities. Today, “elite” doesn’t carry the old-boy, classist, midcentury sense. In fact, law schools strive for an elitism that is quite democratic in comparison with many other fields. As at Yale and Harvard, we at Berkeley seek to build a campus community that is as exciting and diverse as our nation.”