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Filling in the Blanks on
Kagan's Views on Abortion Part One of Three By Dave Andrusko Part Two is NRL PAC's endorsement of Pat Toomey. Part Three is Andrea Bocelli's own true story about abortion Please be sure to take a few minutes to read "National Right to Life News Today" (www.nationalrighttolifenews.org). Please send all of your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like join all those who are now following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha. Over the weekend, what had been the essentially blank slate of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan will begin to take form.
CBS News' Chief Legal Correspondent Jan Crawford drew on papers Kagan wrote when she clerked for pro-abortion ultra-liberal Justice Thurgood Marshall for her story which ran under the headline "EXCLUSIVE: Documents Show Kagan's Liberal Opinion on Social Issues." According to Crawford, "The documents, buried in Marshall's papers in the Library of Congress, show Kagan standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the liberal left, at a time when the Rehnquist Supreme Court was moving to the conservative right." In addition, earlier today The Clinton Presidential Library was "to release the first batch of a 160,000-page trove of records from Kagan's service in the former president's White House," according to the Associated Press. Between 1995 and 1999 she served first as a counsel and then as a domestic policy adviser to Clinton. "The National Archives announced it would post 46,500 pages on the library's website." The AP's Julie Hirschfield Davis added, "During that time, the White House was juggling a host of hot-button issues that could become flash points in Kagan's confirmation hearings, from gun control and abortion rights to a landmark anti-smoking measure that ultimately died in the GOP-led Congress." As I say we will know a lot more about Kagan's views on abortion by Monday as we digest the pages from the Clinton Library. But what we already have from the Marshall papers is intriguing.
According to Crawford, the papers, which are actually legal memos summarizing cases the Court had been asked to consider, "provide a remarkably candid picture of her opinions, including on the most controversial issue Supreme Court nominees ever confront: abortion." In this instance the case involved an inmate who wanted the state to pay for her abortion. "Kagan expressed concern to Marshall that the conservative-leaning Court would use the case to rule against the woman--and possibly undo precedents protecting a woman's right to abortion," Crawford wrote. In a 1988 memo, Kagan warned, "This case is likely to become the vehicle that this court uses to create some very bad law on abortion and/or prisoners' rights." Crawford does an excellent job explaining why what we are learning is important. Kagan has written little, never served as a judge, and has avoided taking high profile positions on contentious issues. In a word senators know next to nothing about her. And she has proven to be particularly evasive. When she was asked in 2009 about the general question of writing memos for Justice Marshall, she shucked it off as the work of a "27-year-old pipsqueak," who was "working for an 80-year-old giant in the law, and a person who, let us be frank, had very strong jurisprudential and legal views." Crawford observes, "But these memos, often written in the first-person, show a more personal approach that suggests she shared many of Marshall's opinions." Crawford's conclusion was, "Taken together, these documents are certain to provoke considerably more questions than the less controversial papers unearthed before her confirmation hearings for solicitor general." |
