Election News Bad News for more than Obama
By Curt Levey, Committee for Justice
Tuesday night’s primary election results contain some bad news for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.
The biggest news of the night was the defeat of Sen. Arlen Specter’s (D – Penn.), Kagan’s harshest critic when her nomination for Solicitor General was before the U.S. Senate last year.
Specter hammered Kagan for her failure to be forthcoming during her confirmation hearing and in answers to written questions. Specter’s take:
“I use the word ‘replies’ carefully because I didn’t get too many answers as to where she stood on some critical issues.”
With Specter no longer facing the constraints of seeking reelection, the former prosecutor is free to go out in a blaze of glory by sticking to principle and demanding that Kagan fill in the many holes in her notoriously thin record. Along with senators like Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson, Specter joins the ranks of Democrats most likely to vote against Kagan’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.
The other piece of bad news for Elena Kagan last night was the overwhelming victory by libertarian Senate candidate Rand Paul of Kentucky. It dramatically demonstrated that the American people’s increasing concern about unrestrained federal power has moved from the living room to the voting booth.
That will make it harder for red and purple state Democratic senators to vote for a Supreme Court nominee whose activist view of judging would make the Court an institution of essentially limitless power.
On that note, more evidence of Kagan’s enthusiastic belief in judicial activism was revealed yesterday when her 1983 Oxford University thesis became available. In it, she writes that
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