(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
Elena Kagan is currently the Solicitor General for the Obama Administration. She is the former Dean of Harvard Law. She is currently one of the candidates under consideration to replace Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who has announced his retirement after this session. Ms. Kagan has never been a judge, not that that is a qualification, but she also has spent little time in a courtroom. Her record on most issues is sparse but what is known about her is very troubling for progressives and this country. Glen Greenwald has been very critical of her citing not just the scarcity of her opinions but her troubling testimony before Senate judiciary committee.
Now four law professors, (Guy-Uriel Charles is at Duke Law School; Anupam Chander is at the University of California-Davis Davis School of Law; Luis Fuentes-Rohwer is at Indiana University’s School of Law; and Angela Onwuachi-Willig is at the University of Iowa College of Law), question her record on diversity while she was Dean.
The first woman Dean of Harvard Law School had presided over an unprecedented expansion of the faculty — growing it by almost a half. She had hired 32 tenured and tenure-track academic faculty members (non-clinical, non-practice). But when we sat down to review the actual record, we were frankly shocked. Not only were there shockingly few people of color, there were very few women. Where were the people of color? Where were the women? Of these 32 tenured and tenure-track academic hires, only one was a minority. Of these 32, only seven were women. All this in the 21st Century.
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The choice of Elena Kagan would put SCOTUS in an alignment to allow the state to operate without any accountability or knowledge by the citizens.
http://seminal.firedoglake.com…
How a fellow New Yorker like young Glenn Greenwald can’t see that someone who grew up in a middle class Jewish family living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side will be putting the Supreme back in the Inferior Court is beyond me.
Americans may have kicked the Dutch out of Manhattan in 1664 and conservatives have been working ever since to make us heartless and cruel but Dutch values still have a very isolated place in the New World. Mostly they reside on the Upper West Side. This is a neighborhood where people live in $9 million brownstones and go park their keisters on folding chairs at the Park Democratic Club come election season.
Did you see Fun City revisited: The Lindsay Years last night? Now there’s a case study for young Glen. John V. Lindsay may have moved across the park and became an Upper East Side Republican but he was born and raised on West End Avenue. What happened when the city elected a Republican with Upper West Side values? We got a Republican who was outspoken against the war a civil rights leader! Out of that Republican we got the nation’s first 911 system, he opened parks to the people by closing parks to traffic, installed air conditioners in the subway cars, gave parents a voice in the education of their children, started lead-poisoning-maintenance programs and began a campaign against incinerated garbage.
Many of us had hoped that taking the lead out of paint would have curtailed conservative values but those wingnuts are like cockroaches. As any New Yorker can tell you a vile infestation is very hard to get rid of, that’s why we never heard any silliness like “Maybe the William F. Buckley has a point” while growing up.
Of course Lindsay became a Democrat before leaving office but now we are worried about a life long Democrat from the Upper West Side?
This is a woman who grew up eating from Zabar’s, Fairway and Citarella but what her opinions will be is a mystery? As a matter of fact, I think once she starts having Gray’s Papaya hot dogs airlifted down to D.C. the rest of the court will swing to the left.
How can anyone not see that Elena Kagan is a secret weapon?