Wednesday, May 12, 2010 8:47 AM
Administration Backs Kagan On Hiring
From this morning's Earlybird:
• "The White House rushed Tuesday to allay concerns raised by some civil rights groups about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan and the hiring record of Harvard Law School when she was dean," the Washington Post reports.
• "Senate Republican leaders are launching a full-on assault" against Kagan "over her lack of judicial experience, but they already appear to have a major problem: Their rank-and-file Members aren't buying into it," Roll Call (subscription) reports.
• Kagan's "nomination is already becoming a flash point in midterm Congressional campaigns as candidates in both parties try to exploit the coming court fight," the New York Times reports.
See commentary after the jump.
• "Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has -- or had, anyway -- the right vision of what confirmation hearings for the high court should be," writes Ruth Marcus in reaction to Kagan's criticism of the confirmation process' ambiguity. "If she lived up to her own standard, she could improve the process enormously -- and be confirmed anyway."
• "Kagan probably will be confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court, if she can resist the temptation to follow her own advice," quips Clarence Page. "Today's Elena Kagan sounds a bit more reserved about educating the public in her confirmation hearings, judging by her hearings for her current job."
• "The most prominent thing about Kagan is her extraordinary ability, while holding high-profile jobs in the legal profession, to say nothing on the major issues of the day," remarks Michael Gerson. "Is it possible Kagan lacks any well-formed constitutional perspective at all? Who knows? Who could possibly know?"
• "Does a gender-mixed court featuring Kagan, [Sonia Sotomayor] and [Ruth Bader Ginsburg] qualify as a diverse court because they are women? Or do these three represent ideological purity in a lace bib? The jury is still out," contends Kathleen Parker.
• "What she will not bring is educational diversity. Her confirmation will leave the court entirely composed of former law students at either Harvard or Yale," notes law professor Jonathan Turley in the Los Angeles Times. "The decision of President Obama to select a nominee from one of these two schools is particularly disappointing as a replacement for Justice John Paul Stevens -- an iconic figure on the court who was also its only graduate from an alternative institution (Northwestern)."
hjp
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
I am of the opinion that the Supreme Court is setting itself up for a legal challenge, as to whether or not 1) their opinions are in fact biased due to their common Ivy League education, and 2) they are engaging in discrimination, by limiting the Court to Ivy League Graduates.
The following applies to Kagan, just as it did to Sotomajor.
This editorial was created by 160 Associated Press readers under a Creative Commons Share-Alike Attribution License 3.0 using MixedInk's collaborative writing tool. For more about how it was created, see here. It can be republished only if accompanied by this note.
Obamas Appointment of Sotomayor Fails to Offer Educational Diversity to Court.
Sotomayor does not offer true diversity to our Supreme Court. The potential power of Sotomayor's diversity as a Latina Woman, from a disadvantaged background, loses its strength because her Yale Law degree does not offer educational diversity to the current mix of sitting Judges. Once she walked through the Gates of Princeton and then Yale Law School she became educated by the same Professors that have educated the majority of our current Supreme Court Justices, and our Presidents.
Diversity in education is extremely important. We need to look for diversity in our ideas, and if our leaders are from the same educational background, they lose the original power of their ethnic and gender diversity. The ethnic and gender diversity many of our current leaders possess no longer brings a plethora of new ideas, only the same perspective they learned from their common Ivy League education. One example of the common education problem is that Yale has been heavily influenced by a former lecturer at Yale, Judge Frank, who developed the philosophy of Legal Realism. Frank argued that Judges should not only look at the original intent of the Constitution, but they should also bring in outside influences, including their own experiences in order to determine the law. This negative interpretation has influenced both Conservatives and Liberals graduating from Yale. It has been said that Legal Realism has infested Yale Law School and turned lawyers into political activists.
A generation of appointees with either a Harvard or Yale background, has the potential to distort the proper interpretation of our Constitution. America needs to decentralize the power structure away from the Ivy League educated individual and gain from the knowledgeable and diverse perspectives that people from other institutions can provide. We should appoint Supreme Court Justices educated from amongst a wider group of Americas Universities.
Harvard -
Chief Justice John Roberts
Anthony Kennedy
Antonin Scalia
Stephen Breyer
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Harvard, Columbia)
Yale
Samuel Alito - Yale JD 1975
David Souter
Clarence Thomas - Yale JD 1974
Sonia Sotomayor - Yale JD 1979
Northwestern Law School.
Justice John Paul Stevens
The Presidents we have elected for the last twenty years, have themselves been Harvard or Yale educated. This has the potential to create an even more closed minded interpretation of our laws.
Yale - Bush Sr. - 4 years
Yale Law - Clinton - 8 years
Yale - Bush, Jr. - 8 Years
Harvard Law - Obama - 4 - 8 years
When we consider that our Nation has potentially twenty - eight years of Presidential influece from these two Universities, as Americans, we should look long and hard at the influence Yale and Harvard have exerted on our nation's policies. Barack Obama promised America Change, but he has continued the same discriminatory policy by appointing a Yale graduate over many qualified candidates that graduated from other top Colleges and Universities in America.