Elena Kagan, SCOTUS Nominee -- Updated

At first blush, Elena Kagan is at best an unimpressive nominee for justice of the United States Supreme Court. She has no track record as a judge and there are plenty of abysmal things in the record that she does have.

For starters, I would not trust any nominee by this president. He has surrounded himself with self-avowed Communists and Maoists. He is a seriously flawed man who thinks himself to be the transformer of America. Think cartoon.

Elena Kagan has many faults as a nominee.

She reportedly kicked military recruiters off the Harvard Campus.

According to Glenn Beck, she said in the Solicitor General confirmation hearings that people who are "suspected" for contributing financially to terrorist groups should be held without bail or trial.

She is accused of coddling leftist plagiarists at Harvard.

She has written that the right to free speech should be balanced against "social costs."

The Washington post has collected ssome of Ms. Kagan's writings. As I sample them, they are bland and uninspired. She is not a great writer by any means. The writings are, by and large, sleep-inducing.

I do not have a problem with Supreme court Justice nominees without prior judicial experience.

Elena Kagan is an uninspired and uninspiring progressive. She will probably sail through her nomination hearings on the theory that it could be worse. It could always be worse. I hope she does not sail through. I hope that the Senate Republicans send a clear message that whoever is appointed should be moderate, and she is not.

I wish it were someone older, much older. The term of the appointment is too long to appoint someone so mediocre.

Update: Unimpressive oral argument before the Supreme Court.

Further update: I am not alone in thinking Kagan's argument was unimpressive.

Sotomayer and Gun Rights

If you love the freedom to own guns for self defense, today's answers by Judge Sotomayor have got to make you nervous (from Yahoo news):

Here's a capsule: Coburn, a strong advocate of individual gun ownership, found an intriguing way to question Sotomayor on that issue. First, he asked her how she could consider that the right to privacy (not mentioned in the Constitution) is settled law but the right to keep and bear arms (the Second Amendment) as unsettled.

Sotomayor started with her usual answer that judges don't make law.

A non-answer.

And she noted that the federal government and many states have laws restricting guns, such as possession of firearms by felons.

Apparently justifying future restrictions that any gun rights supporter would see as unreasonable.

Then the sparing got more interesting.

"Do I have a right to personal self-defense?" Coburn asked.

Sotomayor: "That's an abstract question."

Coburn: "That's what the public wants to know. Yes or no? Do we have that right?"

The judge thought for a moment, then came up with an answer based on her experience as a New York City prosecutor: "If there's a threat of serious injury you can use force. How imminent is the threat? If the threat is in this room and I go home get a gun and come back and shoot you, that may not be legal under New York law."

Coburn: "What the American people want to see is what your gut says."

Sotomayor said that's not how judges decide cases.

.In other words she punted with as much of a non-answer as she could.

Scary.