Alexander Cockburn: "Kagan is the worst possibility thus far to surface"

[brentspeak]

Kagan is now the actual choice and no longer just a possibility. Still, this is a good summation of Kagan and Obama's decision-making. Cockburn also makes the important observation that Justice Stevens was the Court's last link to America's Great Depression. So its even more distressing to know that the person nominated to replace Stevens -- Kagan -- was formerly employed by Goldman Sachs.

http://www.truthout.org/this-will-be-obamas-legacy58652

As Obama and his counselors ponder potential nominees, the air is filled with counsel that Obama should avoid a protracted fight and should pick "a moderate" -- i.e., pro-business, pro-government -- nominee, like Elena Kagan, 49, now solicitor general and, in earlier years, head of the Harvard Law School and, before that, Clinton's deputy domestic policy adviser, in which capacity she oversaw, among other assignments, welfare "reform." One of her colleagues at the White House at that time was Christopher Edley, now the Dean at Boalt, the law school at UC Berkeley. Edley says of Kagan that her politics were "center to center-right."

In the Clinton administration, Kagan helped formulate the Democratic equivalent of what became, in the subsequent W. Bush years, the assertion of unitary executive power. There's zero evidence that Kagan would do anything to redress the right-wing tilt of the Court and plenty that she might exacerbate it, in the areas of executive power, civil liberties and assertion of presidential war powers. In her confirmation hearings as solicitor general, she so entranced the right with her proclamations in favor of the War on Terror, indefinite detention and against any pursuit of war crimes investigations, that Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) said, "it sounded like she was getting a standing ovation from the Federalist Society."

Kagan is the worst possibility thus far to surface...