Tag: solicitor general

Kagan’s Confirmation Could Be High-Water Mark for Big Government

By
Ilya Shapiro

Elena Kagan’s confirmation represents a victory for big government and a view of the Constitution as a document whose meaning changes with the times.  Based on what we learned the last few months, it is clear that Kagan holds an expansive view of federal power – refusing to identify, for example, any specific actions Congress cannot take under the Commerce Clause.  She will rarely be a friend of liberty on the Court.

It is thus telling that Kagan received the fewest votes of any Democratic nominee to the Supreme Court in history, beating the record set only last year by Sonia Sotomayor.  Even several senators who had voted for Sotomayor voted against Kagan, including Democrat Ben Nelson – as did Scott Brown, the darling of these high-profile Senate votes.

It was Scott Brown’s election, after all, that signaled that last year’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey were no fluke, that whether people lived in a Red, Blue, or Purple state, they were tired of bailouts, “stimulus,” re-regulation, and, especially, the government takeover of one-sixth of our economy.  This anger has only grown since then, making itself felt most recently in Missouri voters’ overwhelming (71-29) rejection of the individual health insurance mandate.

“Where does the government get the constitutional authority to do this?” the cry goes up across the land.  Elena Kagan won’t give a satisfactory answer but the American people are right to continue asking.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

Ask Kagan about ObamaCare

By
Michael F. Cannon

Senate Judiciary Committee members should be sure to ask Solicitor General and Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, during her upcoming confirmation hearings, whether she or her office played any part in crafting ObamaCare or the administration’s defense to the lawsuits challenging that law.  If Kagan helped to craft either, that would present a conflict of interest: when those lawsuits reach the Supreme Court, she would be sitting in judgment over a case in which she had already taken sides.

Though the Solicitor General deals with appellate matters, it is certainly possible that Kagan was consulted during the drafting of the law or the administration’s legal strategy for defending it.

The Senate Democrats who drafted ObamaCare took pains to protect it from a constitutional challenge.  The law contains several pages of findings designed to show that the Constitution’s commerce clause authorizes Congress to force Americans to purchase health insurance.  It would have been prudent for Senate Democrats to ask the government’s top appellate lawyer, who belongs to the same political party, whether they had done all they could to protect the “individual mandate” from a constitutional challenge.

Opponents began filing legal challenges to ObamaCare just minutes after President Obama signed it into law, and seven weeks before he announced Kagan’s nomination.  On Tuesday, the Obama administration filed its first response, to a private lawsuit.  According to the Associated Press, that filing “is to be followed in coming weeks and months by federal government court responses to lawsuits filed by many states.”  Regarding the case filed by 13 (soon to be 20) state attorneys general, The New York Times reports, “Some legal scholars, including some who normally lean to the left, believe the states have identified the law’s weak spot and devised a credible theory for eviscerating it.”  It is not certain, but it is certainly possible that the Office of the Solicitor General was consulted on the government’s response to lawsuits that would likely reach the Supreme Court.

If Kagan played a role in drafting ObamaCare or formulating the administration’s legal defense, and is confirmed by the Senate, propriety would dictate that she recuse herself from any challenges to that law that reach the high court.  Supporters and opponents alike should be interested to know whether the Court will judge ObamaCare with nine justices on the bench, or eight.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care, Law and Civil Liberties

Initial Kagan Critiques Miss the (First Amendment) Point

By
Ilya Shapiro

As I’ve been re-reading Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s publications – of which there are surprisingly few for someone of her achievements and reputation – I’ve had half an eye on the TV punditry.  It seems that the leading critique from both the right (e.g., Fox News, Senator Jon Kyl – who’s usually excellent on these things) and extreme left (e.g., Jane Hamsher) is that Kagan doesn’t have judicial experience. 

This just completely misses the point.  As a solicitor general (the “Tenth Justice”) and former dean of Harvard Law – where she did a magnificent job and gained the respect of scholars from across the political spectrum – not to mention senior roles in the Clinton White House, teaching at the University of Chicago and clerking for Justice Thurgood Marshall, Kagan absolutely has the credentials and intellectual chops to be a Supreme Court justice.  Indeed, as I said this morning, her scholarly persona means she’s probably better suited to being a justice than to being solicitor general – especially given that her performance as an oral advocate has left something to be desired.  And we’ve had plenty of non-judges on the Court, people coming from the executive branch (William Rehnquist), academia (Felix Frankfurter), private practice (Lewis F. Powell, Jr.), and politics (Hugo Black).

I actually agree with President Obama that it’s not a bad idea to have somebody with a “different” professional background on the Court – although Kagan’s time in the ivory tower is no more likely to give her a common touch than a nominee coming from the “judicial monastery.”  And, as the president said, Kagan “has won accolades from observers across the ideological spectrum, not just for her intellect and record of achievement, but also for her temperament.”  So the problem really isn’t her supposed lack of relevant experience.

One problem is precisely her very short paper trail – though there are no indications she’s anything but a conventional modern liberal, on which more in future – but something to tease out of that trail, combined with her year as SG, is a certain hostility to the freedom of speech.  For example, in her article “Regulation of Hate Speech and Pornography After R.A.V.,” she attempts to find a constitutional way to restrict the sorts of speech that she personally finds offensive.  And in her defense of the federal “depiction of animal cruelty” statute – which the Supreme Court struck down 8-1 – she argued for a balancing test weighing the value of speech against its social harm.  Not to mention her arguments in Citizens United, the campaign finance statute that, until it was struck down could have banned books, flyers, and movies that contained political speech.  (Interestingly, in Citizens United, she abandoned the very “level political playing field” argument the president invokes to criticize the decision.)

I’m of course not criticizing her appearance as an advocate defending the federal laws at issue in Stevens and Citizens United – that’s her job as solicitor general – but if you read the argument transcripts, you see that she could have done so in ways less sweepingly inimical to free speech. There is other evidence to this effect (see her First Amendment articles here, here, and here, plus others lacking public links), but you get the idea.

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties

Defending Civil Rights and Suing Rogue Prosecutors Is Left-Wing Lawyering?

By
Ilya Shapiro

The National Law Journal and the Wall Street Journal Law Blog note an apparent legal curiosity: Paul Clement, superstar head of King & Spaulding’s appellate group and Bush-administration solicitor general, now “flirts with liberalism” and has “embrace[d] left-leaning causes” to grow his practice.  Is this another case of a conservative lawyer “growing” in office or “drifting” to the left, seduced by the cocktail parties and press attention of the Washington elite?

Hardly.  The two cases that prompted this gnashing of teeth (or cautious optimism, depending on where the commentator resides on the political spectrum) are Perdue v. Kenny A. and Pottowattamie County v. McGhee.  In Kenny A., Clement represented a group of public interest attorneys who won a big case on behalf of mistreated foster children and argued that they should be entitled to the enhanced fees the trial court awarded them for exceptional performance.  In McGhee, Clement’s clients are two men who were framed by overzealous prosecutors and served 25 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit – the convictions for which were based on the prosecutors’ fabricated evidence.

To say that these are left-wing positions is to consider the Left to be the only possible champion of justice and constitutional rights, and to paint the non-Left as standing for limitless, unaccountable governmental power.  Neither of these positions is accurate, to say the least.  If anything, Clement’s positions are solidly libertarian.

Indeed, Cato filed briefs in both cases, and I signed both of them.  You can read our brief in Kenny A. here and in McGhee here – Clement actually called me to make sure Cato got involved in this one – and you can read my blog posts about the cases here and here, respectively.

In short, if Paul Clement has gone red, well then so have I – and trust me, there won’t be any kumbaya confabs at my place any time soon.  My car’s new vanity plate does say FED 51, however – short for Federalist 51 – so feel free to call me out for flirtations with Madisonian political theory.

H/T: Manny Klausner

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties