Elena Kagan Confirmation Hearings

Kagan Sworn In As Supreme Court Justice

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 18:16:00 +0000

She becomes the 112th justice and the fourth woman ever to serve on the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath to Kagan in a ceremony at the court.

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Senate Confirms Kagan To U.S. Supreme Court

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 22:24:00 +0000

That a former U.S. solicitor general and dean of Harvard Law School would attract just five votes from 41 GOP senators underscores just how much the wrangling over federal court vacancies has come to reflect the nation’s growing political divide.

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U.S. Senate Approves Kagan to Join Supreme Court

Quinn Bowman — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 20:47:19 +0000

The U.S. Senate voted 63 to 37 Thursday afternoon to approve Elena Kagan as an associate justice to the Supreme Court, making her the fourth woman to become a justice on the nation's highest court and the third woman on the current court.

President Obama said from Chicago that Kagan's confirmation was"an affirmation of her character and her temperament; her open-mindedness and evenhandedness; her determination to hear all sides of every story and consider all possible arguments."

Kagan is not expected to dramatically change the ideological balance of the court. She was appointed by President Obama to replace retiring associate justice John Paul Stevens, a reliable vote in the liberal bloc of the court.

The vote was mostly along party lines, with five Republican senators and two independents voting with Democrats for her confirmation. Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson was the only senator in his party to join Republicans in voting against her.

We'll have more about the confirmation proceedings on Thursday's NewsHour broadcast. You can follow our full coverage of her nomination and confirmation process here.

Here's the roll call for Thursday's vote. A "yes" is a vote to confirm the nomination.

State	Senators
ALABAMA	Sessions (R), No	Shelby (R), No
ALASKA	Begich (D), Yes	Murkowski (R), No
ARIZONA	Kyl (R), No	McCain (R), No
ARKANSAS	Lincoln (D), Yes	Pryor (D), Yes
CALIFORNIA	Boxer (D), Yes	Feinstein (D), Yes
COLORADO	Bennet (D), Yes	Udall (D), Yes
CONNECTICUT	Dodd (D), Yes	Lieberman (I), Yes
DELAWARE	Carper (D), Yes	Kaufman (D), Yes
FLORIDA	LeMieux (R), No	Nelson (D), Yes
GEORGIA	Chambliss (R), No	Isakson (R), No
HAWAII	Akaka (D), Yes	Inouye (D), Yes
IDAHO	Crapo (R), No	Risch (R), No
ILLINOIS	Burris (D), Yes	Durbin (D), Yes
INDIANA	Bayh (D), Yes	Lugar (R), Yes
IOWA	Grassley (R), No	Harkin (D), Yes
KANSAS	Brownback (R), No	Roberts (R), No
KENTUCKY	Bunning (R), No	McConnell (R), No
LOUISIANA	Landrieu (D), Yes	Vitter (R), No
MAINE	Collins (R), Yes	Snowe (R), Yes
MARYLAND	Cardin (D), Yes	Mikulski (D), Yes
MASSACHUSETTS	Brown (R), No	Kerry (D), Yes
MICHIGAN	Levin (D), Yes	Stabenow (D), Yes
MINNESOTA	Franken (D), Yes	Klobuchar (D), Yes
MISSISSIPPI	Cochran (R), No	Wicker (R), No
MISSOURI	Bond (R), No	McCaskill (D), Yes
MONTANA	Baucus (D), Yes	Tester (D), Yes
NEBRASKA	Johanns (R), No	Nelson (D), No
NEVADA	Ensign (R), No	Reid (D), Yes
NEW HAMPSHIRE	Gregg (R), Yes	Shaheen (D), Yes
NEW JERSEY	Lautenberg (D), Yes	Menendez (D), Yes
NEW MEXICO	Bingaman (D), Yes	Udall (D), Yes
NEW YORK	Gillibrand (D), Yes	Schumer (D), Yes
NORTH CAROLINA	Burr (R), No	Hagan (D), Yes
NORTH DAKOTA	Conrad (D), Yes	Dorgan (D), Yes
OHIO	Brown (D), Yes	Voinovich (R), No
OKLAHOMA	Coburn (R), No	Inhofe (R), No
OREGON	Merkley (D), Yes	Wyden (D), Yes
PENNSYLVANIA	Casey (D), Yes	Specter (D), Yes
RHODE ISLAND	Reed (D), Yes	Whitehouse (D), Yes
SOUTH CAROLINA	DeMint (R), No	Graham (R), Yes
SOUTH DAKOTA	Johnson (D), Yes	Thune (R), No
TENNESSEE	Alexander (R), No	Corker (R), No
TEXAS	Cornyn (R), No	Hutchison (R), No
UTAH	Bennett (R), No	Hatch (R), No
VERMONT	Leahy (D), Yes	Sanders (I), Yes
VIRGINIA	Warner (D), Yes	Webb (D), Yes
WASHINGTON	Cantwell (D), Yes	Murray (D), Yes
WEST VIRGINIA	Goodwin (D), Yes	Rockefeller (D), Yes
WISCONSIN	Feingold (D), Yes	Kohl (D), Yes
WYOMING	Barrasso (R), No	Enzi (R), No

Senate Confirms Elena Kagan To Supreme Court

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 19:00:00 +0000

Solicitor General Elena Kagan was confirmed Thursday to the Supreme Court, with support from Democrats and a handful of Republicans. The vote was 63-37. During debate, Republicans took the opportunity to question Kagan's lack of judicial experience and commitment to judicial restraint. Democrats questioned the direction of the Roberts court and observed that it seemed devoted to protecting "powerful interests."

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Wednesday round-up

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:26:47 +0000

Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to endorse Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court. The final tally was thirteen "aye"s to six "nay"s, with Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) joining the committee's twelve Democrats to vote in Kagan's favor. Today's editions of USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post all have coverage of this step toward confirmation, as do NPR, Slate, CNN, and Politico. C-SPAN has video coverage of the nearly three-hour committee meeting.

In his Washington Post column, Dana Milbank praises Senator Graham's explanation of his vote as a "penetrating indictment of the tribal logic that has overtaken his colleagues." Even so, the vote "ensures [Graham] will face a serious primary challenge in 2014," writes Chris Cillizza on the Washington Post's The Fix blog. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire blog reports on a letter of support for Miguel Estrada that Kagan wrote in response to Senator Graham's questions about Estrada during her hearings.

Revisiting questions about whether, if confirmed, Kagan should recuse herself from hearing challenges to health-care reform legislation, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal opines on "how extraordinary it is that she would have played no role at [the Department of] Justice even in discussing the cases." And at Balkinization, Jack Balkin characterizes the Kagan confirmation battle as reflecting a shift in conservatives' rhetoric: although they have previously insisted that judges should exercise "judicial restraint," he asserts, they now focus on "fidelity to the law" as a result of "the changing mix of constitutional issues before the federal courts." (ACSblog also has a post discussing how "Republicans are looking for the Supreme Court to substantially limit the sweep of the Constitution's commerce clause.")

In another opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Pete Hegseth "“ an Iraq war veteran who testified against Kagan's confirmation "“ argues that Kagan "does not belong on the Supreme Court" because she "used her position of authority as dean of Harvard Law School to impede, rather than empower, the warriors who fight, and have fallen, for our freedoms." An opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor criticizes Kagan for a different reason: Thomas Bowden of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights contends that Kagan "rejects the Founders' view of the Constitution as a charter of liberty whose purpose is to protect individual rights" and instead "adheres to the modern view that it's a mechanism for establishing unlimited majority rule over the individual."

Briefly:

In his Sidebar column for the New York Times, Adam Liptak focuses on a single sentence in Justice Ginsburg's opinion in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, in which she wrote "“ discussing laws affecting gays and lesbians "“ that "[o]ur decisions have declined to distinguish between status and conduct in this context." That sentence, Liptak suggests, could be "both a time bomb and a tea leaf that [may] figure in litigations concerning same-sex marriage on two coasts."
The New York Times reports that immigrants whose deportations would now be invalid under the Court's decision in Carachuri-Rosendo v. Holder have "no way to turn that legal vindication into a chance to come home."
NPR's Ari Shapiro has a story about the President's judicial nominations "languish[ing]" in the Senate. He reports that "the Senate has confirmed only 37 of Obama's judicial nominees, a little more than half as many as during the same period of time under President Bush."
The Hartford Courant has a report on a Connecticut eminent domain dispute between a developer and the city of Branford. The developer will soon ask the Supreme Court to review the case.
Constitutional Law Prof Blog has a post on a new biography of Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
And finally, at the Huffington Post, humorist Tim Siedell asks whether we can "really afford to hire another Supreme Court Justice in this economy."

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