Change! Elena Kagan Backs 'Vapid and Hollow' Hearings at Her Own Confirmation!

The main story's at NYT, "Kagan Shifts on Disclosure of Legal Views at Hearings":

At the opening of questioning in her Supreme Court confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Solicitor General Elena Kagan quickly backpedaled from her past call for nominees to speak more openly and in specific terms about their constitutional views.

Under questioning by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, Ms. Kagan said she thought it would be inappropriate for her to talk about how she might rule on pending cases or cases “that might come before the court in the future” — or to answer questions that were “veiled” efforts to get at such issues.

Moreover, she said, she also now believed that “it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to talk about past cases” by essentially grading Supreme Court precedents, because those issues, too, might someday come again before the court.

In a 1995 book review, Ms. Kagan wrote that recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings had taken on “an air of vacuity and farce” because nominees would not engage in a meaningful discussion of legal issues, declining to answer any question that might “have some bearing on a case that might some day come before the Court.” She called on senators and future nominees to engage in a much more open and detailed discussion of legal issues.

Actually, Kagan was a little more elaborate in her 1995 article. She attacked what she called a confirmation process that was a "vapid and hollow charade."

Check the link and note (in the last few pages) how the public is served with a "serious" and "substantive" discussion of the constitutional issues when the nominee is Robert Bork (who threatened to bring about "Bork's America") and not someone like Elena Kagan (who took $20 million in royal Saudi money to establish a gender-oppressive center for Islamic studies at Harvard).

And check Neomi Rao, "Elena Kagan and the 'Hollow Charade': Progressive views of judging are difficult to defend. That's why no recent nominee has tried."

This woman is a disaster: Dishonest, indecent, and extremely radical. The public would be well served by an open and frank airing of Elena Kagan's views. Instead we get the vacuous spinelessness that is the essence of confirmation to the High Court in the post-Bork age.

Thanks Democrats.

More at The Hill and Memeorandum.