Thread: Here Comes The Judge! Here Comes The Judge!

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... QD9GGGNC80


Kagan practices answers, poise in mock hearings
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS (AP) – 37 minutes ago
WASHINGTON — For several grueling hours each day, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan sits at a witness table, facing a phalanx of questioners grilling her about constitutional law, her views of legal issues and what qualifies her to be a justice. They are not polite.
It's all a rehearsal for Kagan's big performance next week during her confirmation hearings at the Senate Judiciary Committee. The "murder boards" are elaborately planned sessions where Kagan hashes out answers to every conceivable question and practices staying calm and poised during hours of pressure and hot television lights.
About 20 members of President Barack Obama's team play senators, peppering Kagan with tough questions designed to trip her up or elicit an unscripted response. Kagan practices being herself. She works to avoid handing her opposition the 10-second sound bite that could derail her so-far smooth trajectory toward confirmation.
The process is shrouded in secrecy; the White House refuses to describe it. But officials say that White House counsel Bob Bauer's office is in charge of the sessions, which take place in an office building just steps from the West Wing, with Deputy Counsel Susan Davies running most of the day-to-day practice.
The questioners, who at various times have included Kagan's pals from academia as well as White House and Justice Department lawyers, are friendly; but the practice sessions themselves are designed to be anything but.
Rachel Brand, a lawyer who helped prepare former President George W. Bush's nominees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, for their Judiciary hearings, said the subject sits through "tough questions, argumentative questions, annoying questions."
The purpose, she said, "is to ask those hard questions in the nastiest conceivable way, over and over and over, so that the nominee can get any indignation, frustration, outrage, what have you, out of their system in advance so they don't come out at the hearing."
The murder boards also are designed to help Kagan — the 50-year-old former Harvard Law School dean who was confirmed last year as Obama's solicitor general — brush up on the subjects she'll be asked about. When she's not rehearsing, White House officials say, Kagan has been spending her time reading and reviewing key cases and legal writings.
"It's a huge cram-course on constitutional and other relevant areas of law," said Ian Millhiser, an analyst at the liberal Center for American Progress who was a legal researcher for another Democratic-aligned group during the confirmation hearings for Obama's first nominee, Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
"No matter how brilliant you are and how much time you've spent dealing with legal issues, there's going to be an important issue out there that you don't know everything about, and that a senator is going to ask you a question on," Millhiser said.
Kagan and Obama's team have plenty of clues about what questions to expect. She spent the five weeks immediately following her nomination May 10 meeting individually with more than 60 senators in private on Capitol Hill. Aides who accompanied her took notes on what was said, in part to help inform Kagan's hearing preparations.
Nominees and White House lawyers also scrutinize transcripts of previous Supreme Court nomination hearings for clues on what the 19 members of the Judiciary Committee typically ask.
Some senators reveal their questions in advance, like giving a nominee an open-book exam.
Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., who voted against confirming Kagan as solicitor general because he said she wouldn't answer important legal questions, has written to her three times and spoken on the Senate floor to broadcast what he will ask this time.
Specter wants to ask whether she would vote to hear a case on the constitutionality of the terrorist surveillance program. He also wants her views on lawsuits brought by Holocaust victims and their heirs to recover World War II-era insurance claims, and suits brought by 9/11 victims. His must-ask list is long.
Kagan herself has written scathingly of the confirmation hearings, calling them a charade in which nominees work hard to evade important questions. Now she is probably practicing effective ways to do precisely that, say students of the process.
Incendiary hearings, like the one Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas called a "high-tech lynching" to the face of his inquisitors, are rare. It's in the interest of the nominee's sponsors to make them tedious, and they often succeed at that.
But Roberts noted that while nominees are at the witness stand for as many as 12 hours, if they make one 10-second mistake, it's all anyone will ever know about them, said Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, who quoted the chief justice in his book "Confirmation Wars."
"That is what the murder boards are about," Wittes said. "They're about making sure that that 12 hours is as boring as possible, and making sure that those 10-second moments that will make them not boring do not happen."
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 03943.html

Elena Kagan: Hostile to free speech?


By David N. Bossie
Friday, May 21, 2010
I have no doubt that Elena Kagan is an intelligent and capable attorney, and I do not believe, as some have asserted, that her lack of judicial experience disqualifies her for a seat on the Supreme Court. Rather, I oppose Kagan's nomination because I believe that every American has a fundamental right, guaranteed by the First Amendment, to speak out for or against their elected representatives. Anyone who does not feel that way should not be put in a position of authority where she can restrict that right.

THIS STORY
Why Elena Kagan shouldn't be confirmed
An anti-military law dean? Not to this Marine captain.
I am referring, of course, to Kagan's role in the landmark free-speech case brought by Citizens United, the grass-roots organization I lead. Even before Justice John Paul Stevens announced his retirement in April, President Obama telegraphed his intent to choose his next Supreme Court nominee based on that person's opposition to my organization's right to participate in the political process. Beginning with his unprecedented rebuke of the court during his State of the Union address and culminating with his remarks announcing Kagan's nomination, Obama has let it be known that opposition to the First Amendment rights of grass-roots organizations such as Citizens United has become the new litmus test.

Such a test is disturbing in many ways, not least in that handpicking nominees on the basis that they will rule a particular way on a particular issue is unsound policy. But the problem is compounded when the issue at hand is the First Amendment right of Americans to support or oppose their elected officials without fear of government reprisal.



Kagan's defenders will argue that she was merely doing her job as solicitor general and that her personal beliefs cannot be divined from her arguments in Citizens United v. FEC. But the president's remarks in introducing Kagan as his court nominee indicate that he believes otherwise. That day, the president mentioned only one case and said: "Despite long odds of success, with most legal analysts believing the government was unlikely to prevail in this case, Elena still chose it as her very first case to argue before the court." I think we should take the president's stated rationale for his decision at face value.

Kagan's defenders will also argue that the new litmus test has to do with preventing huge corporations from drowning out "the people" during elections. But this is no more than a resurrection of the tired politics of class warfare, calculated to stoke the fires of populist anger to mask an erosion of the First Amendment. Keen observers will note that the plaintiff in the only case Obama mentioned that day is Citizens United -- not Exxon Mobil or Goldman Sachs. Citizens United is an organization funded by an average donation of $50 from hundreds of thousands of Americans nationwide. Our members, whose voices would be drowned out were they prohibited from pooling their limited resources in a group such as ours, are "the people." It is their right to speak that Obama and Kagan oppose when they criticize the court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC.

Most troubling of all is that the line of reasoning running through Kagan's opposition to our case leads directly to the conclusion that the government has the authority to ban books and other forms of communication. When our case was reargued before the high court last September, Kagan tried to walk back from that reasoning, saying that the "FEC has never applied this statute to a book." But she specifically noted that pamphlets could be censored, which leads to questions: What about content published on a Kindle or an iPad? What about YouTube or other Internet sites that do not have 200 years of tradition and jurisprudence protecting them? Is a statement from a government lawyer that "we've never prosecuted anyone for that" really an acceptable protection of a constitutionally guaranteed right? As Chief Justice John Roberts rightly noted that day, "we don't put our First Amendment rights in the hands of FEC bureaucrats."

To argue that Citizens United v. FEC was about anything other than the right of American citizens to join together and exercise their constitutionally guaranteed right to political speech is typical Washington double-speak. The remedy for speech that one does not agree with is more speech, not regulation. A nominee who believes that certain types of speech and certain speakers should be censored for no other reason than that speech affects a lawmaker's chances of reelection is not fit for the Supreme Court. If confirmed, Kagan would wield enormous power over the constitutionally guaranteed right of every American to participate in the political process -- a right that she believes government can restrict.

The writer is president of Citizens United.

This individual has the capacity and the backing to make China's harmonious society efforts look like free speech to us. OBummer has already set up some cases for her to be decisive on - wonder if we will still be able to come here afterwards?

"It's a huge cram-course on constitutional and other relevant areas of law,"

She needs a constitutional law course, since all she's been studying and teaching is international law.

http://willyloman.wordpress.com/2010/05 ... an-family/


All in the Family; The Globalist Kagans of Brooklyn
Posted on May 10, 2010 by willyloman
Elena Kagan must produce her entire family lineage prior to her confirmation hearings and this is why…
by Scott Creighton
Elena Kagan will be the next Supreme Court justice as she was just announced as President Obama’s choice to fill the seat of one of the last real liberals left on the Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens. The right won’t oppose her except in some sort of pretend way and the left is already doing strained back flips trying to make her into some kind of “pragmaticâ€

Kagen works hard to side step answering YES I am a progressive... And also can't say that YES...I support the constitution... Said she "does not know what that means..." Horse pucky......

Confirmation Hearing - "Elena Kagan, Are You A Legal Progressive?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7570llJfEI