VIDEO: Obama SCOTUS Pick Elena Kagan Calls Activist Israeli Judge ‘My Hero’

posted at 8:41 pm on June 23, 2010 by The Other McCain
[ Supreme Court ]   

From Americans United for Life:

Paul Bedard at U.S. News & World Report:

[T]he video . . . . shows Kagan in 2006 praising retired Judge Aharon Barak during a ceremony at Harvard when she was dean of the Harvard Law School. At the event, he was presented the Peter Gruber Foundation 2006 Justice Prize. According to the group, the $500,000 award “acknowledges individual efforts and encourages further advancements toward bringing about a fundamentally just world.”

In a Wednesday morning press briefing, Judge Robert Bork — whose 1987 nomination to the Supreme Court was blocked by Democrats — said that Elena Kagan’s experience at Harvard Law School was not proper preparation for a seat on the high court: “The academic world is not a place in which you learn prudence and caution and other virtues of a judge.” Bork also implied that Kagan is a token:

Bork believes that Kagan’s nomination was rooted in the president’s desire to make history with the nomination of an additional woman to serve on the high court. “For some reason, presidents get all excited for having ‘firsts’, and this would be the first court with three female judges on it,” Bork said.

Kagan has called the Bork hearings “the best thing that ever happened to constitutional democracy.” But with groups like Americans United for Life fomenting opposition to Kagan and the latest Rasmussen poll indicating support for Obama’s nominee to be Borked, the White House is pushing back:

Yesterday, in advance of the AUL conference, the White House organized a conference call of its own with three people who were fellow Supreme Court law clerks with Kagan in1987 and 1988, at the time she clerked under Marshall.
They stuck closely to the administration’s script: Kagan, they said, was fair-minded and nonideological.
“I don’t think that Elena was thought of amongst the clerks as being either liberal or conservative,” said Teresa Wynn Roseborough, a former clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens. “She approached things without an agenda. She was a consensus-builder and wanted to understand the points of agreement as much as possible.”

Yeah. Asking her former fellow clerks if Kagan is an ideologue — kind of like asking a World Cup soccer ref if the U.S. is offside.

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