Elena Kagan could reshape the US Supreme Court

For the first time since it was set up 221 years ago by America's Protestant founding fathers, the US Supreme Court is poised to have a bench without a single Protestant justice, if Jewish candidate Elena Kagan is chosen.

Barack backing: President Barack Obama introduces Solicitor General Elena Kagan as his choice for Supreme Court Justice in the East Room of the White House in Washington Photo: AP

By Karin Zeitvogel in Washington, for AFP

11:54AM BST 12 May 2010

If the Senate confirms Elena Kagan, President Barack Obama's choice to replace retiring justice John Paul Stevens, she will join two other Jewish justices and six Roman Catholics serving on the highest court in the land.

The thought of a Protestant-free Supreme Court bench was too much to bear for some.

"I'd like to offer here... a lament for the passing of American Protestantism," American religion scholar Diana Butler Bass wrote on BeliefNet.com about Obama's decision to nominate Kagan, a Jew.

"There will be no one with Protestant sensibilities on the court, no one who understands the nuances of one of America's oldest and most traditional religions - and the religion that deeply shaped American culture and law."

The United States was, after all, once the largest Protestant nation in the world, she noted. Protestants currently make up the country's biggest religious group.

To Frances Kissling, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, a changing Supreme Court was the natural reflection of demographic developments in US society.

"The image of America as Kansas - wheatfields and farmers and European Protestant stock - is no longer what America is," she said.

"Most of our presidents, our justices, our powerful people have been mainline Protestants but that has changed and we have an America now with a president who has combined Muslim-Christian roots, a Supreme Court with six Roman Catholics and what will be three Jews," she added.

"I think that's marvelous."

Not too long ago, having all Jewish or Catholic justices and zero Protestants on the high court was just as unthinkable as an African-American president of the United States.

"Can you imagine going back in time and telling the founders that the day would come when there were no Protestants on the Supreme Court?" Rod Dreher wrote on Beliefnet.

"Can you imagine telling someone born 50 years ago that within their lifetime they'd live to see a SCOTUS (Supreme Court) populated exclusively by Catholics and Jews?"

Both Catholics and Jews have fought to overcome discrimination in the United States, including exclusion from plum jobs at law firms and quotas on numbers for admission to Ivy League colleges, which were in place until the second half of last century.

"Prior to the 1970s, no Catholic or Jew got high enough in the law profession that they could be considered for the Supreme Court," said Kissling.

"The opening of employment and education opportunities in 1960s is a dominant factor in this change in the court."

Catholics already hold 67 per cent of the seats on the Supreme Court and Jews will hold 33 per cent, if Kagan passes muster with the Senate as expected.

"Some anti-Semites will see something dangerous about having three Jews on the Supreme Court but I think it's a real tribute to how far one can go in America, whatever one's religion or ethnicity, on the basis of hard work if barriers are removed," Dreher said.

Bass, meanwhile, expressed sadness at seeing a Protestant-free high court.

"I can't help but think that losing the lived memory of American Protestantism will be a loss for all of us," she wrote.

A survey released two years ago by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life showed that barely 51 per cent of Americans were Protestants, compared to nearly two-thirds in the 1960s, and predicted that Protestants would no longer be in the majority in the United States by the middle of this century.

Catholics made up a quarter of the US population and Jews less than two per cent, the 2008 survey showed.

At the time the survey was released, Pew fellow John Greene foretold what is playing out today at the Supreme Court.

"So many of the values and institutions in American public life came out of Protestantism," Greene said.

"I think you're likely to see a change in those institutions and the cultures that support them" as the religion of the founding fathers loses ground in America, he added.

Source

.

Kagan To Be Sworn In As US Supreme Court Justice

Kent Klein Washington 06 August 2010

Photo: AP
President Barack Obama applauds Elena Kagan during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Friday, Aug. 6, 2010, to mark her confirmation to become the next Supreme Court justice.

Elena Kagan will be sworn in Saturday as the third woman on the nine-member U.S. Supreme Court, the nation's highest court. President Barack Obama Friday celebrated the upcoming event.

At an East Room reception, President Obama said the appointment of the fourth woman Supreme Court justice in U.S. history, and the third on the current court, is a significant step forward. "A sign of progress that I relish, not just as a father who wants limitless possibilities for my daughters, but as an American proud that our Supreme Court will be a little more inclusive, a little more representative, more reflective of us as a people than ever before," he said.

The U.S. Senate confirmed Kagan as a justice on Thursday, despite heavy opposition from Republicans, who say she lacks experience because she has never been a judge.

The 50-year-old U.S. solicitor general is Mr. Obama's second successful nominee to the high court. His first, Sonia Sotomayor, was appointed last year.

On Friday, the president praised what he called Kagan's formidable intellect and path-breaking career. He also said she will carry out the ideals of the U.S. justice system. "While those founding truths about liberty and equality may have been self-evident, they were not self-perpetuating. And it is the members of our highest court who do the vital and constant work of ensuring that they endure," he said.

Kagan pledged to work her hardest to support and preserve the U.S. Constitution and dispense justice equally and fairly under the law. "An obligation to protect and preserve the rule of law in this country, an obligation to uphold the rights and liberties afforded by our remarkable Constitution, and an obligation to provide what the inscription on the Supreme Court building promises: 'Equal Justice Under Law," she said.

U.S. justices are appointed for life. Kagan will succeed Justice John Paul Stevens, who recently retired at the age of 90.

Stevens was considered the most liberal member of the court, and Kagan is not expected to change its current ideological balance. The court has a five-member, conservative-leaning majority.

The Supreme Court's new session begins in October.

.

Source: http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/Kagan-To-Be-Sworn-In-As-US-Supreme-Court-Justice-100154614.html

.

Kagan Defends Approach To Military Recruiting

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan answers questions from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, the second day of her confirmation hearings.

Published: June 29, 2010

by Carrie Johnson

Elena Kagan's treatment of military recruiters at Harvard Law School took center stage Tuesday on her second day of confirmation hearings to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

In tones at times emotional and steely, Kagan defended her record as a Harvard dean and expressed her respect for students who belonged to the military.

"This has been a sort of long process, and sometimes an arduous one," Kagan said. "I only cried once," when she read a favorable opinion piece by Marine Corps Capt. Robert Merrill, a former student now in Afghanistan.

Kagan, the Obama administration's current solicitor general, asserted that "military recruiters had access to Harvard students every single day I was dean." She did not back down, even when Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Senate Judiciary Committee's ranking Republican, challenged her veracity about the atmosphere she fostered on campus.

Senate conservatives have criticized Kagan for her role in reinstating a ban on military recruiters using career service facilities on the Harvard campus because the "don't ask, don't tell" policy toward gays violated the university's anti-discrimination policy. Harvard Law School still allowed recruiting through student groups.

.

.

Source: http://m.npr.org/news/front/128176699

.

Elena Kagan To Be Tapped as Next Supreme Court Justice

Patricia Murphy
Columnist

Posted:
05/9/10

President Barack Obama will name Elena Kagan to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court, Politics Daily has learned. Kagan, 50, is currently the solicitor general of the United States and is the former dean of Harvard Law School. If confirmed, she would be the fourth woman to serve on the high court, and the third woman on the current court.

Kagan was on the short list for the last Supreme Court vacancy that Sonia Sotomayor eventually filled. Both President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have interviewed her to fill Stevens' seat on the court.

On Sunday morning, Attorney General Eric Holder hinted that Kagan could be the next member of the high court. "She's done a wonderful job in the Justice Department. I've known her since the Clinton years. And I think she would be a great justice," Holder said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"I think people will get an understanding who she is, what her judicial philosophy is, if in fact she is the pick," Holder said.

A native of New York City, Kagan attended Princeton University and Oxford University in England, and finished magna cum laude from Harvard Law School.

In addition to having been the dean at Harvard law, she was also a professor there and at the University of Chicago, where Obama was a constitutional law professor. She also clerked for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and was in private law practice in Washington, D.C.

Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury Secretary and current economic adviser to President Obama, named Kagan to be the first woman to be dean of Harvard Law School in 2003.

Although her legal career has included time in private practice, academia and government service, including four years as associate White House counsel in the Clinton White House, she has never served as a judge.

Beyond Kagan's extensive resume, Democrats consider her strongest credential to be the fact that she was confirmed by the Senate in 2009 as the Justice Department's top litigator. The Senate voted then, 61 to 31, to confirm her, with conservatives Tom Coburn, Orrin Hatch and Jon Kyl voting for her. All 31 no votes came from Republicans, including the top GOP member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jeff Sessions.

If the president formally nominates Kagan on Monday, as expected, her nomination will go to the Senate Judiciary Committee and then the full Senate for consideration. The process will likely last throughout the summer, and if successful, Kagan could be seated as a part of the Court's first day of session in October.

.

Source: http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/05/09/elena-kagan-tapped-as-next-supreme-court-justice/?icid=mainhtmlws-main-ndl1link1http%3A%2F%2Fwww.politicsdaily.com%2F2010%2F05%2F09%2Felena-kagan-tapped-as-next-supreme-court-justice%2F

.