{"id":10931,"date":"2010-05-18T09:06:01","date_gmt":"2010-05-18T14:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=10931"},"modified":"2010-05-18T09:06:01","modified_gmt":"2010-05-18T14:06:01","slug":"release-the-kagan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=10931","title":{"rendered":"Release the Kagan!"},"content":{"rendered":"

The mystery, wrapped in an enigma, smothered in secret sauce that has been Elena Kagan might be granted a little more clarifying light with the release of her Princeton and Oxford theses<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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The White House says it soon will release two theses Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan wrote while attending Princeton and Oxford\u00a0\u2014 ending a game of cat-and-mouse that erupted on the Web after Princeton asked a conservative website to remove her thesis for copyright reasons.<\/p>\n

Some conservative critics contend that Kagan’s 1981 Princeton thesis\u00a0\u2014 called \u201cTo the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933\u201d \u2014 shows Kagan’s allegiance to, or at the very least her affinity for radicalism, a notion Kagan\u2019s supporters reject.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Reams of paper like Kagan’s theses will be released between now and the beginning of her confirmation hearings and volumes of ink will be spilled analyzing ever sentence she’s ever uttered or written.\u00a0 But when it comes to illuminating Kagan’s actual judicial philosophy, the evidence that\u00a0points to\u00a0whether Kagan is a\u00a0Harriet Miers or\u00a0Ruth Bader Gingsburg nominee remains like much of her legal practice – theoretical.<\/div>\n
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Kagan is most certainly not Sonia Sotomeyor, attempting to backtrack decades of decisions and pronoucements by hewing to the time-honored tradition of most SCOTUS nominees of sharing their\u00a0opinions as loudly as\u00a0Marcel Marceau before the Senate.\u00a0 Rather, Kagan’s limited experience and record paint a picture as clear as a rorschach.\u00a0 Kagan has both denounced “don’t ask, don’t tell”<\/a> and stated that “there is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage.”<\/a>\u00a0 She’s been described as a strong Democrat and has given judicial cover to indefinite detention <\/a>of terrorists.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Are these and other policies inherently contradictory?\u00a0\u00a0No, but politics (like all other forms of power) abhors a vacuum and Kagan’s meteoric rise may as well have been designed by Bissell.\u00a0 Even her academic allies found her lack of publication worrisome<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s hard not to feel that Kagan’s nomination represents the crossing of a sort of judicial Rubicon into a valley of nominees from either party that remain as hard to philosophically decipher as hieroglyphics without the Rosetta’s Stone.\u00a0 The results are proxy debates.\u00a0 Kagan’s sexuality becomes a tittering talking point instead of debating the judicial politics of marriage.\u00a0 Her 30-year old senior thesis is mined by political prospectors who unearth pyrrha and claim it to be ideological gold in substitution for any judicial record.<\/p>\n

The comparison with the man who nominated her is obvious and has been\u00a0made by many others.\u00a0 But perhaps the true connection Elena Kagan shares with Barack Obama is the triumph of the mediocre; the teaching of the unintended lession that keeping your head down, not publishing anything of note (whether at Harvard or Princeton), and agreeing for the sake of agreement can take you further than an educated expression of your values or views.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Such viriginal purity\u00a0can only be obtained by staying away from\u00a0dirty reality that contains failure, compromise and controversy.\u00a0 Perhaps in this case people ought to hope that Kagan’s confirmation hearings show a little “dirt.”<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The mystery, wrapped in an enigma, smothered in secret sauce that has been Elena Kagan might be granted a little more clarifying light with the release of her Princeton and Oxford theses: The White House says it soon will release two theses Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan wrote while attending Princeton and Oxford\u00a0\u2014 ending a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":425,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,105,82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-capitalism-v-socialism","category-first-ringer","category-scotus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/425"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10931"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10960,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10931\/revisions\/10960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}