New York Times — A Climb Marked by Confidence and Canniness
Elana Kagan posed for her high school senior yearbook photo at an elite public school in Manhattan in a judge’s robe and holding a gavel with a quote from Justice Felix Frankfurter. She talked to her friends about her goal of reaching the Supreme Court.
After 33 years of relentless careerism, she’s likely to see her peculiar teenage dream come true.
Writers Katharine Seelye, Lisa Foderaro and Sheryl Gay Stolberg chart the path of the president’s solicitor general, who will be announced today as his choice to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, the last Protestant member of the soon-to-be all Jewish and Catholic court.
Kagan’s success is testament to the power of political connections and her prodigious accumulation of them.
She is the daughter of a Yale-educated lawyer who fought the establishments of co-ops on behalf of tenants associations.
She was an ally of Eliot Spitzer in Princeton student government, interned on Capitol Hill, wrote her senior thesis on the rise and fall of radical socialism for advisor Sean Wilentz, got a fellowship to Oxford, wrote for Harvard Law review with Jeffrey Toobin, clerked for Abner Mikva, got in as a clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall taught at the University of Chicago with Barack Obama and Larry Lessig.
Then she went into the Clinton administration working for Mikva as a deputy solicitor general, led the administration’s failed push for tobacco regulations, but got herself into the administration’s inner circle and made new allies, like Larry Summers, who later hired her to be the dean of Harvard’s law school.
Through it all, she played poker, smoked cigars and shot hoops with the dudes who dominated the liberal legal establishment, inching her closer and closer to her goal.
Seelye, Foderaro and Stolberg develop an image of someone whose gifts for building consensus reached across ideological lines on Capitol Hill and at Harvard. That’s certainly the role President Obama hopes her to play in bringing Justice Anthony Kennedy over to the liberal wing of the divided court on key decisions.
But Seelye, Foderaro and Stolberg also paint the picture of a grimly determined striver who did little in the way of legal heavy lifting but wheedled advantage after advantage out of her connections and plowed over those who stood in her way.
The question for Kagan, who at 50 would be the youngest woman ever to reach the Supreme Court, is what do you do once you’ve reached your goal?
“While she was respected inside the Clinton White House for her smarts (she would often bat around constitutional law questions with the president), one Clinton colleague, Jamie Gorelick, told The New York Sun in 2006 that Ms. Kagan was seen by some as brusque and overly demanding. She sometimes rubbed people in the Justice Department the wrong way.
‘She was extremely aggressive when she was in the White House in trying to carry out the president’s agenda,’ Ms. Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general and a fan of Ms. Kagan, was quoted as saying. ‘She was not the most popular person there in part because of that.’”
Washington Post — What Obama sees in Kagan
Writer Michael Shear takes an, er, less nuanced view of Elana Kagan than his counterparts at the Times, saying that she “practically defines legal gravitas.”
But she’s rarely published a paper, never served as a judge, devoted her time at Harvard to development, not academic, pursuits, and has no readily discernable legal philosophy.
There will be many Republicans who complain about Kagan’s lack of experience as a judge or practicing attorney, suggesting that she is somehow an unorthodox pick.
But I suspect that it is her conventionality and correctness that President Obama likes so much. She is every bit as much a product of the new Eastern elite as he is. She has all the right supporters and all the best degrees – Princeton, Oxford and Harvard.
She may not have the gravitas that Shear is frothing about, but she’s been well vetted by the liberal establishment Obama loves.
“The idea at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue is that the process should take about 6 to 7 weeks, leading to a hearing at the Judiciary Committee and a quick vote in early July. That leaves plenty of time for the back and forth, but also plenty of time for Kagan to take her seat on the court before the next year’s session starts.”
New York Times — Holder Backs a Miranda Limit for Terror Suspects
After lots of criticism over the handling of the Times Square bomber, the Obama administration has offered a compromise in which the public safety exception to a defendants’ Miranda rights would be expanded.
Holder’s version would allow court admission of testimony obtained while a suspect was being pressed for information to avoid another imminent attack.
The more hawkish plan would be to strip away the naturalized citizenship of terror suspects and toss them in the brig at Gitmo.
Holder should have no trouble getting his modest expansion approved, though.
What’s of particular interest, though, is the administration’s embrace of the idea that the Times Square dud bomber was an agent of a monolithic Pakistani Taliban, talking about funding and organization as if it were a complex operation. This was a $1,500 caper, including $1,200 for the SUV. He didn’t even pay for parking. There was no track covering and very poor execution. Mohammed Atta, he was not.
The about face likely comes because the alternative answer — that we are going to have to keep dealing with wanna-be Jihadis from the West – is too terrible to speak of.
Writer Charlie Savage explains the new talking points from the attorney general.
“For months, the administration has defended the criminal justice system as strong enough to handle terrorism cases. Mr. Holder acknowledged the abrupt shift of tone, characterizing the administration’s stance as a “new priority” and “big news” in an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“We’re now dealing with international terrorists,” he said, “and I think that we have to think about perhaps modifying the rules that interrogators have and somehow coming up with something that is flexible and is more consistent with the threat that we now face.”
Wall Street Journal — World Races to Avert Crisis in Europe
After resisting last week, Europe has agreed to a $1 trillion cash dump in which central banks will buy up government debt.
This is in addition to the $140 billion bailout for Greece already underway, and doing for Angela Merkel’s centrist governing coalition with German voters what the TARP did for the Republicans.
What the EU government (which Vice President Joe Biden addressed last week, saying Brussels was co-capital of the Free World with Washington) has enacted is the kind of currency debauchment that the Fed has been engaging in here. They will print more euros to buy more government debt to keep interest rates low so governments can go on borrowing.
The hope is that the extra liquidity will prevent other profligate governments, like the ones in Portugal and Spain, from ending up having to make Greco-style draconian cuts and face popular unrest from state workers.
This meets the demands of bankers who want to keep lending money, investors who feared contraction in the government-centric economy of Europe, and public workers who think austerity sounds pretty uncool.
As for the remaining members of the private-sector in Europe, they must be really bummed to realize that the fake government in Brussels is now real enough to obligate them for a $1 trillion slush fund to pay Portuguese debt.
Britons may not be happy to have no government to speak of at the moment, but they should consider the alternative.
Writers Stephen Fidler and Charles Forelle explain who else liked the idea of a EU cash dump:
“In an indication of the world-wide concern, the White House said President Barack Obama on Sunday spoke with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to urge “resolute action to build confidence in the markets.”
With a self-imposed deadline to reach agreement before Asian markets opened Monday morning, ministers from all 27 EU nations aimed to assemble a package impressive enough to arrest spreading worries about the debt problems of euro-zone governments. Once confident they could quarantine Greece’s turmoil, the EU’s leaders have been grappling with gathering worries about the debt problems of euro-zone governments such as Portugal, Spain and Italy.”
Robert Samuelson — The welfare state’s death spiral
As we’ve seen to bitter result here and as Europeans are now discovering, for elected officials, it’s never a good time for austerity.
Samuelson looks at how the failure of the euro and explains how European socialism might cost us all very dearly.
“The welfare state’s death spiral is this: Almost anything governments might do with their budgets threatens to make matters worse by slowing the economy or triggering a recession. By allowing deficits to balloon, they risk a financial crisis as investors one day — no one knows when — doubt governments’ ability to service their debts and, as with Greece, refuse to lend except at exorbitant rates. Cutting welfare benefits or raising taxes all would, at least temporarily, weaken the economy. Perversely, that would make paying the remaining benefits harder.”
–My column about the political need for competent governance prior to expanding government is here.
