Tweet
At 12:30 pm ET, Elana Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination hearing begins with opening statements from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Kagan’s opening statement will probably conclude the hearing today, and shouldn’t be expected until much later. Kagan will be introduced by Massacusetts Senators John Kerry and Scott Brown. Doug Kendall of the Constitutional Accountability Center will liveblog the hearings.
As I remarked yesterday, I can’t believe how muted the response has been to a Supreme Court nomination. It’s been the most invisible one I can remember in my lifetime. Obviously there have been other major issues that have cropped up and overshadowed the nomination, but Kagan seems to have a knack to be so inoffensive and low-profile as to engender almost no response. Even tomorrow, on the crucial first day of questioning, her hearing will be overshadowed by the confirmation hearing of David Petraeus for Afghan commander. Cable networks are more likely to cover the Petraeus hearing live.
This is occurring because there’s little doubt of Kagan’s impending confirmation; even Orrin Hatch dismissed any talk of a filibuster. But the Supreme Court plays such a powerful role in the lives of every American, you’d think the horse race, the will-she-or-won’t-she of confirmation, wouldn’t drive the discussion. You’d think people would want to know just who in the heck Elena Kagan is. After all, today we received multiple important Supreme Court decisions on the last day of the session, with the NRA winning a local gun rights case (hey, it’s about time that group got itself a win), a law school allowed to deny funding to a discriminatory Christian group, and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board basically struck down. These are important, crucial decisions, and who makes them matters.
It’s a shame that we have such little insight into Kagan before and during this process, and let’s face it, the hearings aren’t likely to improve this condition.
10 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About FDL News Desk
This appt is invisible because the fix is in. The PTB have approved Kagan as one of their tools.
Yes, you are correct. obamarahma is going to drive the court more to the right. We can’t look for any real relief from him for our problems. He is giving more cover to the catfood commission by this G8/G20 promise to cut the deficit in half in three years.
Jane has a new post already in progress: There Can Be No Progressive Activism Without Progressive Funding
I’d like to give a damn, but I don’t.
Kagan’s never done or been anything of note that wasn’t wholly owned by either political or corporate interests; she was a Clinton politico first and a Harvard fund-raiser second. She provided a haven for torture cover-up and apologist/indefinite detention advocate Cap’n Jack Goldsmith and her claim to fame is fundraising. She has been a part of the Obama unitary executive, it’s not a crime if the President wants it, policy cartel and argued directly to the Bench that lawyers whose clients the President has decide to denominate (and selectively prosecute) as terrorists should be put in jail.
John McCain would have nominated better. After Kagan, I’m so very very very done with this precept that we “have” to vote for Democrats, no matter how repulsively pro-torture and disgustingly in lobbyists pockets they are, bc of the children of the Sup Ct nominees.
Kagan is such a freakin political, cover my ass on my assassination drones programs and my illegal special forces assassination squads and let the Exec skate on crimes of any kind, appointment that I really don’t give a damn what the Republicans do. Even if they do it for all the wrong reasons, if they keep Kagan off the court I may even vote for some of them.
Obamaco, which John Brennan has recently come right out and owned up is Bushco2.0, has pretty much lost me and if one of their wormy policy crew who worked up the embrace of torturers and continued “extraordinary” rendition and jailing lawyers and indefinite detentions etc. doesn’t get a plum for all their finger poking, it won’ break my heart.
OTOH, it’s all so much kabuki – she’s in, and the country is the worse for it.
Twice this morning, once on NBC’s Today Show and once on NPR during drive time, the bobble heads said that Kagan would make this the third appointment of a woman to the SuperDuper Court. Am I missing something? Was Sandra Day O’Connor just a cabbage after all? (:>
Are you sure they weren’t trying to convey the message that Kagan would be the third woman serving concurrently with 2 prior appointees on the court. She would be the 4th woman appointed, but 3 would all be serving on the court together, which is more women than the court has ever had serving at one time.
What I do not like about Kagan is that at the very least, she a careerist, i.e., an opportunist who has been preparing herself all her life for this job, and has managed successfully to get the nomination through persistent lobbying, manipulation of the system, brown-nosing, etc. That is why public & press know very little about her. To some extent, she is aligned in this approach to the Obama and his ilk, and got selected for the same reason. I by no means suggest any conspiracy: it is just that a whole generation of people has grown up in this mold. They are ‘non-partisan’ or ‘bipartisan’, no commitment to anything, change their views according to the prevailing wind, and would do what is convenient. there is no right or wrong, everything has the same value, etc. I just do not trust such people
NBC may have ~ it went by pretty quckly, but the NPR speaker definitely said Kagan’s Senate approval “would make her the third woman to sit on the Supreme Court.” Maybe Sandra stood up all those years? Nah. (:>
At some point you have to realize that we have lost this fight, that the Presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme Court are bought and paid for tools. The only power we have left is the potential power of negation: vote out every incumbent in Congress and then Obama, regardless the consequences. Let this crap-artist system collapse, it would be better than this pointless left-right diversion that serves no purpose beyond providing material for Keith, Chris, and Rachel! Sorry to be so negative, but as the wife says: Some point you have to face reality!
At least Kagan isn’t another nutjob.
Let her pass.