With committee and floor votes beginning this week on the Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kagan, skeptical lawmakers could not resist the opportunity to search for a weak point that might provoke last-minute controversy.
Six Republican senators submitted questions that produced 74 pages of written responses from Kagan. In ritual form, her answers — released Friday — were finely sanded to avoid any clamor.
Kagan carefully hewed to the themes she struck at last month’s hearings: In cases in which she voiced opinion, she said, it was that of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she once worked.
Asked repeatedly whether her expressions of opinion in memos to Marshall reflected a proclivity for overturning precedent or viewing cases through a policy-minded prism, Kagan answered cautiously that mere disagreement is not enough to warrant overturning a precedent. At the same time, she reaffirmed, the court should properly consider whether a “decision has proved unworkable over time, whether the decision’s doctrinal foundations have eroded, or whether the factual circumstances that were critical to the original decision have changed.”
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Tags: Congress, Elena Kagan, Media, News Item, Supreme Court
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