Tuesday, May 11, 2010

SCOTUS Nominee Kagan & Thurgood Marshall, Birds of a Feather

SCOTUS Nominee Elena Kagan doesn't have much of a paper trail, having never been a federal judge. This doesn't mean we have no insight on how she would interpret the US Constitution.

As a former clerk to Associate Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall it may be rightly inferred that Kagan agrees with, and has in fact never tried to distance herself from his views on judicial activism. Marshall said:

"You do what you think is right and let the law catch up." Stanford Law Review, summer 1992

This is the same Marshall that was known for being lazy, skipping deliberation to watch "Days of our Lives". He once told his friend Justice Brennan that there was a "lot to be learned about life" from soap operas. Apparently not so much about law was to be learned from the US Constitution.

Kagan has already shown her own willingness to invalidate the plain meaning of texts in her time at Harvard. As Dean of Harvard Law School in 2004 and 2005 she gave two professors (Larry Tribe and Charles Ogletree) a smack on the wrist when they were outed for plagiarism. Well no, not even that. Kagan said "Nevertheless, we regard the error in question as a significant lapse in proper academic practice." Any student would have been suspended at the very least, if not expelled, as per Harvard's written policies. Tribe and Ogletree were not suspended or fired, as leftist lawyers they are above such rules in Kagan's world.

Kagan will not interpret the Constitution as written nor even try to, but will in fact do all in her power to make it a nullity as she legislates from the bench in order to push an ideology that would never be accomplished by legal means through the legislature.

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