Morning Bell: Former Attorney General Ed Meese on Supreme Court Nominee Elena Kagan

Conn Carroll /

According to multiple sources, at 10 am today President Barack Obama will announce his decision to name Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. Kagan, who served as the Dean of Harvard Law School from 2003 to 2009, would be the first justice without judicial experience in almost 40 years. But this does not mean she is in any way a stranger to the Senate confirmation process. In fact, in 1995 she authored an article on judicial confirmations for the University of Chicago Law Review where she wrote:

The Bork hearings presented to the public a serious discussion of the meaning of the Constitution, the role of the Court, and the views of the nominee; that discussion at once educated the public and allowed it to determine whether the nominee would move the Court in the proper direction. Subsequent hearings have presented to the public a vapid and hollow charade, in which repetition of platitudes has replaced discussion of viewpoints and personal anecdotes have supplanted legal analysis. Such hearings serve little educative function, except perhaps to reinforce lessons of cynicism that citizens often glean from government. … [T]he fundamental lesson of the Bork hearings [is] the essential rightness—the legitimacy and the desirability—of exploring a Supreme Court nominee’s set of constitutional views and commitments.

On this point, we find agreement with Ms. Kagan. As we documented first with the Justice Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings, and again with the University of California at Berkeley law school Associate Dean Goodwin Liu hearings, President Obama’s leftist legal nominees have been completely unwilling and unable to defend their liberal legal views from Senate questioning. Instead they have retreated or renounced their past writings in an all too familiar spectacle that Kagan has said: “takes on an air of vacuity and farce.” We sincerely hope that Kagan continues to reject this model and that the U.S. Senate fulfills its proper advice and consent role. Responding to the news of Kagan’s nomination, Former Attorney General Ed Meese released the following statement:

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