I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Elena Kagan
Everybody wants to know what Obama’s Supreme Court pick, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, thinks about abortion. And right now at least, everybody is pretty disappointed. That’s because Kagan, who has never served as a judge (despite being nominated by President Clinton) doesn’t have a record of decisions on the issue—and she hasn’t written much on the subject. But one memo from her years in the Clinton White House does shed some (weak) light on what some say could be a “sleeper issue” during the confirmation process.
The Associated Press dug through the Clinton Library archives and found a few documents that give insight into the abortion issue.
Back in 1997, when she was working for President Clinton, Kagan recommended that he support a compromise on late-term abortions, proposed by Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), that would have banned the procedure except in cases where the woman’s health was in danger.
Although President Clinton was pro-choice, banning late-term abortions would have put him in conflict with abortion rights groups. But in a memo to the president, Kagan said he should support the compromise—to avoid risking an override of his veto of a more restrictive bill.
What does it all mean? Hard to say. Perhaps that she’s pragmatic? Politically calculating? Not a die-hard idealogue? All of those descriptions would be consistent with a long profile of Kagan published Monday by the New York Times.
More documents should be released before the confirmation hearings begin, but for now, as Slate.com’s Dahlia Lithwick wrote yesterday, “the inscrutable Elena Kagan makes everyone nervous.”
From Lithwick’s story:
…CBS legal correspondent Jan Crawford predicted that the [confirmation] battle would not be contentious at all: “She’s very engaging very challenging, she’s quite dynamic in her personality,” she said, “and you see that when she’s arguing cases before the Supreme Court. The justices really like her —you should see Justice Scalia (obviously a conservative) and Kagan going back and forth.”
Interesting. Here’s more:
Just as some have argued that Kagan’s lack of important academic scholarship makes her better suited for the court, there is a strong argument to be made that Kagan’s understated, even mellow, outings as [solicitor general] show that she will approach the job of Supreme Court justice just as Obama would wish: open-minded, scrupulously fair, and always willing to concede error (so much so that she has sometimes been faulted for giving too much ground on Citizens United). She is always measured and polite. In fact, if you listen to her oral argument in the Citizens United case, you may well be struck by the fact that it’s Roberts who plays the role of oral advocate while Kagan seems to be striving for cautious centrism.
