June 29, 2010
The Senate Judiciary Committee's top Republican spent much of his allotted 30 minutes for questioning Elena Kagan on Tuesday morning by painting her as antimilitary. Sen. Jeff Sessions suggested President Obama's Supreme Court nominee had created a hostile environment for the military by disfavoring military recruiters when she was dean of Harvard Law School earlier this decade.
But Kagan gave...
June 29, 2010
Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Judiciary Committee's least partisan member, injected a distinctive and salutary element Tuesday afternoon into a dreary confirmation process drenched in partisanship, yet devoid of real drama. The South Carolina Republican engaged Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan in a good-natured dialogue—and tried to teach viewers a lesson—about the need to tamp down the bitter...
June 28, 2010
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont and senior Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama this afternoon set the broad themes of the committee's nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court in their opening statements.
While stressing Kagan's distinguished legal résumé—acclaimed Harvard Law School dean, first woman in that position, respected professor,...
June 28, 2010
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont and senior Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama this afternoon set the broad themes of the committee's nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court in their opening statements.
While stressing Kagan's distinguished legal résumé—acclaimed Harvard Law School dean, first woman in that position, respected professor,...
June 28, 2010
Although the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling in favor of gun rights is getting most of the attention during its busy, final day before a three-month recess, there were several other significant rulings. Here are the highlights:
- The justices ruled by 5-4 that the University of California's Hastings Law School can deny official recognition, funding, and campus facilities to a Christian student...
June 28, 2010
For gun controllers, the bad news is that the Supreme Court Monday ruled for the first time that the right "to keep and bear arms" in the U.S. Constitution's 2nd Amendment restricts state and local power to impose gun controls.
The good news for gun control is that this new-found right may not restrict gun-control laws very much.
The 5-4 decision does appears to doom the exceptionally...
June 27, 2010
Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Illinois says he will press Elena Kagan at her confirmation hearing to be "as forthcoming" about her views of specific issues as she once argued other Supreme Court nominees should be. Many commentators have also called on her to disclose her specific views. But Kagan will not do that. And she should not.
Her current role has no doubt given Kagan a very...
June 21, 2010
With Solicitor General Elena Kagan's Supreme Court confirmation hearing due to start June 28, left-leaning skeptics worry that she may be more deferential to presidential war powers—at the expense of civil liberties—than retiring Justice John Paul Stevens.
It's true that in the future, the justices are likely to take the president's side more often than in the George W. Bush years. But if that...
June 17, 2010
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy has floated the idea of passing a new law to allow a retired Supreme Court justice to sit on a case in which a current justice has recused, to avoid 4–4 ties.
This proposal, reported on June 16 by National Law Journal's Blog of Legal Times based on an interview with Leahy, who said he had drafted a bill and would probably introduce it, would be...
June 11, 2010
In 2009, while seeking confirmation as solicitor general, Elena Kagan gave a seemingly forthright written response when asked in writing by Sen. John Cornyn: "Given your rhetoric about the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy - you called it 'a profound wrong - a moral injustice of the first order' - let me ask this basic question: Do you believe that there is a federal constitutional right to same-sex...
