Not that our side doesn’t do it too, but still…
“[Kagan] hasn’t written that much, and what’s she written is technical,” said the [former senior GOP] aide, who worked on judicial nominations. “She goes into the confirmation process with 59 votes. Unless she murders someone between now and the vote, she gets through.”
The source predicted, however, that Senate Republicans would raise concerns with the nominee to rally the party base and raise money.
“That’s what it’s all about,” said the GOP source. “The nomination will be used for two things: raising funds and energizing the base to vote in 2010. It’s all about turnout at this point.”
If you’ve been reading this blog, you know I’ve been saying this for a while. And I’ve been saying that Republicans care about the Supreme Court about fifty times more than Democrats do, because they want to use the court to change laws they’ll never have the votes to change in Congress. Democrats want the laws to stay the same. We had no problem with prohibiting corporations from being able to make unlimited expeditures in politics, for example.
Just came back from a trip to the store to buy milk. Mike Malloy was talking about Kagan on Air America. She sounds really bad, really right wing, anti-union, anti-civil rights.
That’s not my impression at all.
I see a woman who knew she wanted to be SC justice by the time she posed in a judge’s robe in her high school yearbook and quoted Felix Frankfurter. She comes from the Socialist Republic of the Upper West Side, from a family of ultra-liberals and educators. Everything she’s done has been with this nomination in mind.
Her record is scarce because she knew it needed to be scarce.
I have concerns, but not that she’s anti-labor or right-wing. She may be too deferential to executive power in maters of national security. But she’s a solid left-wing Democrat on pretty much everything else.
I am glad you are so sure. It just bugs me that she could get where she did(meaning head of Chicago and Harvard Law) while writing next to nothing .. that just seems odd to me .. plenty of professors would kill for that
She doesn’t seem to care at all about the fourth amendment or torture, and neither does Obama.
Ok, it’s official: I oppose Kagan’s nomination, outright. I said we didn’t know what her views were b/c she was a blank slate, well, no more:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/10/elena-kagan-urged-bill-cl_n_570935.html
Screw this. We have an anti-woman candidate here, who has possibly expressed support for unchecked executive power. She’s a right-winger.
I don’t know about that .. but it is obvious that she sucks up to power .. 🙁
I don’t even care about that if this is, as BooMan says, her life’s dream. She has no reason to “suck up” anymore if she is confirmed, as it’s highly unlikely she’ll be doing anything else for the rest of her life. Plus it’d be obvious why she was doing it.
Still, if she supports banning abortion under any stage for whatever reason, I oppose her confirmation on those grounds alone. There should be zero restrictions whatsoever; it is a decision for the doctor and the woman to make (assuming the woman is in good mental-health). If a doctor feels comfortable performing one at 8 months and the woman, for whatever reason, wants it, then that’s her choice.
Respecting your point of view and reserving judgment on Kagan’s political advice until I can study it carefully, here is the what Roe v. Wade said about the availability of abortion.
This was amended in Planned Parenthood v. Casey:
So, it has never been the law of the land that someone could get an abortion at 8 months for any reason. And, frankly, aborting a healthy fetus at 8 months is simple infanticide if there is no threat to the health of the mother.
Like I said, I will have to look at Kagan’s advice carefully, but your position strikes me as extreme if you think it should be legal to abort a healthy, viable fetus at eight months if the health of the mother isn’t in question. No court has ever considered that to be reasonable, and you won’t find any prospective justices who agree with you.
a.) The mental health of the mother would be in question of the highest order if she wanted to abort at that late in the game if her health wasn’t in danger, and neither was the fetus’s. I put that qualifier there for a reason.
b.) That memo says only the health of the mother; my point was that the health of the fetus isn’t involved. According to her, a woman should be forced to give birth to dead fetuses and fetuses with severe birth defects or is non-viable?
The exception is ONLY threat to a woman’s life. So if a dead fetus is more of an inconvenience (rather emotionally painful at that) than a direct threat, you are forced to give birth. In fact, this is THE biggest problem with the ban on IDX.
So I don’t see my views as extreme at all. I think it was misread, or rather, I should have made it more explicit.
Hey, seabe, are you serious: abortion at eight (8!) months? Really?
See above.
The other point I forgot to make is that another reason I don’t support any restrictions is because you’re not going to find a doctor (or a mentally stable woman, for that matter) who will abort at that late in the game if her fetus is healthy and so is she.
That’s my point of saying “there should be no restrictions.”
It’s all very provocative. You wouldn’t draw a line. What’s then the latest time when a reputable doctor and a sane pregnant woman would decide NOT to abort the fetus?
I don’t know. I’ve never heard of a late-term abortion being performed unless the mother’s health was deteriorating, or the fetus was dead or dying.
I do know that restricting access to abortion altogether has led people as late as 7th months to try and self-abort:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-5147231-504083.html
Of course it wasn’t her choice, as her bf threatened to break up with her, but this is not uncommon. Not to mention if abortion was more widely accessible, she wouldn’t need to abort late-term in the first place (assuming that was her choice).
A dead fetus is obvious not viable. What are you talking about?
I entirely agree about access to abortion, but that has nothing to do with what Clinton, Kagan, and her boss suggested.
So she’s a political whore, who will go along with anything just to get power? Sounds more like Julius Caesar than Thurgood Marshall.
“There should be zero restrictions whatsoever; it is a decision for the doctor and the woman to make (assuming the woman is in good mental-health). If a doctor feels comfortable performing one at 8 months and the woman, for whatever reason, wants it, then that’s her choice.”
That statement pretty much sums up why most Americans who share most line item views with progressives on matters of civil justice and the like shutter at the prospect of a “progressive” nation.
“Whatever reason”? Firstly, no ethical doctor would abort an 8 month old fetus (a baby) for “whatever reason”. No woman, unless insane, would be so cavalier as to consider the abortion of an 8 month old fetus for “whatever reason”. Lines have to be drawn in every aspect of life. A civil society, irrespective of political ideaology, should be able to agree that a viable life should not be taken for “whatever reason”. I’m stalwart abortion rights proponent, but I’m also a mother, and I know what an 8 month old fetus, CHILD, looks like and feels like in my womb, and believe me I think I speak for all women that “whatever reason” would not be a consideration for aborting that child.
And like it or not, most Americans agree with Kagan’s position on late-term abortion, so if the far left thinks that’s going to derail her nomination, you’re delusional.
Read what I responded to BooMan with. I made it clear:
I put the qualifier there for a reason.
There should be no restrictions because no sane woman, whose fetus is in perfect health, would abort at that late in the game unless her health was deteriorating because of it. No doctor would perform an abortion at that late of a stage, either.
Thus, there is no reason for any restrictions whatsoever. I see restrictions creep, and I stand by my convictions that I do not trust the right-wing of this country to settle for “late term only if…” They will continue to march, taking every last inch of that rope. Don’t believe me? Look at the states around you who continue to make it more restrictive than ever before.
Canada has no restriction on their abortion rights, none whatsoever. They’re doing fine.
As the Huffington story explains, this was a Daschle amendment designed to head off a veto override on a more extreme Republican anti-abortion bill. Freedom to abort a viable fetus except when the mother is at risk is hardly an exclusively rightwing position. Clinton favored the bill already — as did Kagan’s boss. This was political advice on how Clinton could make the best of bad possibilities, not ideology. Also from the article: “Kagan and Reed urged Clinton to support the compromise despite noting that the Justice Department believed the proposal was unconstitutional.”
I don’t see the human cloning quote in the article, or see what’s wrong with the advice.
.
In a May 13, 1997, memo from the White House domestic policy office, Kagan and her boss, Bruce Reed, told Clinton that abortion rights groups opposed Daschle’s compromise. But they urged the president to support it, saying he otherwise risked seeing a Republican-led Congress override his veto on the stricter bill.
White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said “judges confront issues differently than staff attorneys for an administration.” He noted Chief Justice John Roberts made a similar point during his nomination when he was questioned about positions he took as an attorney in the Reagan administration’s Justice Department.
Indeed, the memo is more of a political calculation than a legal brief, but Kagan and Reed urged Clinton to support the compromise despite noting that the Justice Department believed the proposal was unconstitutional.
Feminist Blog: Elena Kagan is Not Anti-Choice
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
We’re all understandably jumpy about the state of the country after the last few years (decades?). In particular, those of us who take the Constitution seriously are understandably jumpy after the past decade (e.g., Clinton’s impeachment, Bush v. Gore, the unitary executive, Citizens United).
But come on people, take a deep breath.
This is a Supreme Court nominee who worked for Reps. Ted Weiss (her congressman) and Liz Holtzman (in her 1980 US Senate campaign). Anyone who’s followed New York City politics knows that Weiss and Holtzman were among the most progressive Democratic elected officials of their generation (and it was a pretty progressive generation).
Kagan then clerked for Abner Mikva and Thurgood Marshall. If there’s been a Supreme Court nominee with better liberal credentials (since, say, Thurgood Marshall himself), then I apologize because I missed it.
I haven’t ventured into the right-wing blogosphere to see what they’re saying about Kagan, but if I were them, I’d be terrified that Obama has picked a liberal John Roberts: young, intelligent, persuasive—but a progressive who will influence the Court’s direction for the next 30 years.
Wake the fuck up.
It does not matter at all what she “believes.” Not in terms of her being confirmed it doesn’t. It is all about power, politics and the media, and all of your prattle about “beliefs” is just so much useless hot air.
If Obama is strong enough by the numbers…votes in the Senate plus and/or multiplied by his own approval ratings as Senator rats scurry to cover their own electoral backsides…and if she is not too ugly, too Jewish-looking and/or too lesbian-looking (Sorry, but there it is. Our American Idol media at work.), then she will be confirmed.
Deal wid it.
If some combination of those factors militate against her confirmation, then by hook or by crook she will be “withdrawn.” That is…one way or another something will be found that will either give her an excuse to quit or give Obama an excuse to pursue another candidate. An undocumented housekeeper, some strangeness in her tax returns, a suddenly found heart condition, a prediliction towards sexual activity with goats…who knows? Any excuse will do.
Watch.
That’s the way it works.
Fer chrissake, people…just look at the losers who have been foisted upon us over the last 30 years or so!
Please.
Roberts?
Thomas?
Scalia?
Alito?
Please!!!
Why do you think that this one will be any different?
This system is broken.
This judicial system is broken.
Bet on it.
Somewhere this morning I ran across a mainstream headline that purported to have just found out that our criminal justice system is biased against minority people.
Lord!
Lord!!!
The Supreme Court!!!???
You mean the system that dropped the Bush Bomb on the world in 2000?
Please.
All hype, no cattle.
Wake the fuck up.
Obama has.
That’s why he’s the Preznit.
Bet on it.
AG
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS ?????
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/05/top-strategist-advises-gop-to-prolong-scotus-fight-to-blo
ck-obama-agenda.php?ref=fpb
The smoking gun: an AUDIO of a republican strategist suggesting to delay the SCOTUS nomination process as long as possible in order to derail the administration’s agenda about immigration reform, energy, etc…
The ultimate proof that the republicans don’t give a damn about governing and solving problems when they’re not in power. The country is on its knees ?? Some problems need URGENT attention ? They don’t CARE !!. Just as long as they can keep the democrats from being successful.
Sure, we’ve known this FROM THE BEGINNING. But hearing it directly is something else.
Folks in the know, can you make this go VIRAL ?? Not only all democrat activists have to listen to this, but this audio has to be used to convince ordinary voters that the republican party doesn’t act in good faith. A good part of the electorate thinks that BOTH parties are equally responsible for the problems in Washington.
A dream: this audio on the Rachel Maddow Show.
yes, dream indeed!!
Do we really understand the Obama first term? It just seems to me that we are getting Clinton’s third term, and this is going to be a Republican Lite administration.
Unbelievable, given that we have Democratic majorities in the Senate and House. But even with these majorities, we seem incapable of pushing forth a liberal-socialist agenda. Is Obama appreciating that the “triangulation man” who advised Clinton eventually turned against him?
You thought the White House was going to lead a socialist agenda? Really? In what country?
After only 16 months, Obama’s first term has been the most successful and consequential of any president since Reagan, and of any Democratic president since Johnson. And that’s despite unprecedented rule manipulation by Republican Senators that has resulted in nearly 300 bills that have passed the House but haven’t even made it onto the Senate floor for debate. If the Senate operated under rules similar to the House, commentators would be talking about Obama having a legislative record of accomplishment to rival LBJ and FDR.
As for the Supreme Court, he’s nominated two candidates, both of whom are (in the view of most observers) likely to be solidly center-left justices for years to come.
As for the “triangulation man”, I assume you mean Dick Morris of Fox News. I think Obama’s been pretty clear about what he thinks of the entire Fox News operation.
I think he’s also been pretty clear that he wants to be remembered as a president who fundamentally changed the country’s direction in a progressive direction (much as Reagan did in a conservative direction). It’s a big country; it takes a long time to turn around.