My blog on the Elena Kagan nomination prompted a lawyer friend to call. His position is that this is the most critical issue for immigration patriots since the Bush Amnesty wars. A Kagan-influenced Supreme Court can be counted upon to follow her predilections and sabotage any immigration restraint legislation, and will very likely move to shut down discussion on the matter too. The left is only one vote away from a majority on this, the senior legislating component of the US Federal Government.
Newsmax.com is alert to the free speech question. Kagan Argued to Ban Political Pamphlets By Dan Weil Tuesday 11 May 2010 discusses Kagan's effort
to forbid companies from engaging in political speech such as publishing pamphlets that advocate the election or defeat of a candidate for federal office.
This was so brutally denounced by Chief Justice Roberts that it is difficult to see how collegiality could ever be established.
"The government urges us in this case to uphold a direct prohibition on political speech. It asks us to embrace a theory of the First Amendment that would allow censorship not only of television and radio broadcasts, but of pamphlets, posters, the Internet, and virtually any other medium that corporations and unions might find useful in expressing their views on matters of public concern,...
Its theory, if accepted, would empower the government to prohibit newspapers from running editorials or opinion pieces supporting or opposing candidates for office, so long as the newspapers were owned by corporations ... as the major ones are."
Justice Kennedy
wrote in the majority opinion that Kagan was defending a law that represents an illegitimate attempt to use "censorship to control thought."
Greatly to his credit, Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OKLA) has had the courage to declare against Kagan in a solidly reasoned Press Release:
as the Dean of Harvard Law School …she banned the U.S. military from recruiting on campus, an issue very important to me. She took the issue even further when she joined with other law school officials in a lawsuit to overturn the Solomon amendment, which was adopted by Congress to ensure that schools could not deny military recruiters access to college campuses. Claiming the Solomon Amendment was 'immoral,' she filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in Rumsfeld v. F.A.I.R opposing the Amendment.
That curious specimen Dick Morris appears on NewsMax.com to ludicrously argue that
Kagan 'Moderate' Democrat Tuesday,11 May 2010
Based on the Elena Kagan that I knew, she would be a moderate on the court. She'd be a little bit like Sandra Day O'Connor . .
Morris must really think Newmax.com readers stupid. The New York Times puff piece yesterday A Pragmatic New Yorker on a Careful Path to Washington, By Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Katharine Q. Seelye and Lisa W. Foderaro.) reports Kagan worked on Liz Holtzman's 1980 Senate campaign, having also interned with Representative Ted Weiss. She then benefited from the patronage of former Congressman Abner Mikva who as a Federal Judge gave her a clerkship. All dedicated leftists (the first two usually 100% in the Americans for Democratic Action rankings) ... and fellow Jews.
But then again, so is Morris. There has been a surprising amount of MSM comment on the exclusion of Protestants from the Court; this is the boot that hasn't dropped.
