Elena Kagan: Day 2

Elena Kagan easily weathered the second day of her confirmation hearing, despite some ugly behavior by Republican Senators.

A poised Elena Kagan on Tuesday spent the second day of her Supreme Court confirmation hearing fending off Republican efforts to paint her as a liberal activist, saying she’d be a fair, open-minded justice and refusing to call herself a "legal progressive."

"I honestly don’t know what that label means," she said.

However, when Kagan was asked later where she stood politically, she said she’d been a Democrat all her life and that ”my political views are generally progressive.”

Senate Judiciary Committee members peppered Kagan with a wide range of questions, trying to discern a judicial philosophy and sense her temperament.

Democrats, who control 58 of the Senate’s 100 seats, routinely praised the record of the 50-year-old solicitor general, as well as her performance this week, and predicted confirmation. Republicans vowed to keep firing away at her record and philosophy. President Barack Obama nominated her to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. The hearings were to continue Wednesday.

Kagan looked comfortable most of the time Tuesday, as if she were among old friends, but there were times when she sat alert and even turned combative as Republicans hammered away at issues such as military recruiting at Harvard Law School while she served as its dean.

“I feel like she was not rigorously accurate in describing the whole nature of the circumstance, and so I’m disappointed in it,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the committee’s senior Republican member.

Lawmakers from both parties asked Kagan, in sometimes scattershot fashion, about the day’s biggest controversies, including abortion rights, campaign finance laws, national security and gun control.

While saying that she’d judge cases on their individual merits, she offered some glimpses of her views. When considering abortion rights, Kagan stressed, “the continuing holdings of the court are that the woman’s life and that the woman’s health must be protected.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, quizzed her on whether she agreed with the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that corporations and labor unions could spend unlimited sums on political activity, a view that Kagan opposed as solicitor general.

“I did believe we had a strong case to make,” she said.

She left herself room to go both ways when commenting on the Supreme Court’s rulings Monday that put strict state and local gun laws in jeopardy. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a leading gun-control advocate, asked why the cases suddenly “become settled law."

“Because the court decided them as they did,” Kagan said. “And once the court has decided a case, it is binding precedent.”

Then again, Kagan said, “there are various reasons why you might overturn a precedent,” including whether it proves unworkable over time.

She bantered with the senators at times.

She joked with Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., that if court hearings were televised, “It means I’d have to get my hair done more often.” When Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., asked her what she was doing on Christmas Day, she grinned and said, “Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.”

Kagan disarmed Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, when he asked about her master’s thesis assertion that judges could help steer the law. “I would ask you to recognize I didn’t know a whole lot of law then,” she said… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <McClatchy DC>

Although Kagan was circumspect about her opinion on issues that might come before the court, she revealed more about her nature and judicial philosophy than Roberts and Alito combined.  And subsequent decisions have shown that the little those two did reveal was deceptive.

Rachel Maddow and Dahlia Lithwick had some interesting observations.

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Keith Olbermann and law professor, Jonathan Turley, exposed the hypocrisy and ugliness of GOP behavior,

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I agree with both that the questions from both sides of the aisle, especially the Republicans, were designed more for home consumption than anything else.

I listened to the hearings all day while working on other things.  Before Obama nominated her, she was low on my list, as I would prefer a more outspokenly progressive nominee.  Nevertheless, I believe that shwe is a woman of integrity.  I like Elena Kagan.