Roundup: Media's Take

Norman Solomon: Kagan in Context: Shafting Progressive Values

[Norman Solomon is co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America. He is the author of a dozen books including"War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com.]If President Obama has his way, Elena Kagan will replace John Paul Stevens - and the Supreme Court will move rightward. The nomination is very disturbing, especially because it's part of a pattern.

Iain McLean: That Cabinet Manual in Full

[Iain McLean is a member of the History & Policy network. He is Professor of Politics at Oxford University and Official Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford. His work has bridged history and political science.]Some Conservatives have accused the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, of stacking the deck against them by insisting that Gordon Brown remains Prime Minister until he gives up trying to form a coalition, thus giving him the first move. Others, notably Professor

Andrew Cohen: Elena Kagan and John Roberts: Yin and Yang or Two of a Kind?

[Andrew Cohen is a two-time Edward R. Murrow Award-winner and legal editor and chief network legal analyst and commentator for CBS News Radio and its hundreds of television and radio affiliates around the country.] They both attended and excelled at Harvard Law School. They both worked for their respective patron/presidents at the Office of the White House Counsel. He clerked for his predecessor, the late chief justice of the United States, before working in the solicitor general's

Gabriel Winant: Smart Money Says Kagan Will be Confirmed, with Some Grumbling

[Gabriel Winant is a freelance writer and graduate student, currently living in the United Kingdom.] So, now that President Obama has nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court, at least we know the main thing we'll be arguing about for the next few months. But it's not entirely clear just what that argument will be about, or what shape it will take. Thanks to a nominee who seems to have purposefully kept herself something of a blank slate, at this stage, we're ju

Paul Campos: Is Elena Kagan the Next Harriet Miers?

[Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado at Boulder.] As the rumblings become louder that President Obama is going to choose U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan as our next Supreme Court justice, somebody needs to ask a rather impolitic question: How, precisely, is Kagan's prospective nomination different from George W. Bush's ill-fated attempt to put Harriet Miers on the nation's highest court? On its face, the question seems absurd. Five years a

Ilya Somin: Preliminary Reflections on the Kagan Nomination

[Ilya Somin is an Associate Professor at George Mason University School of Law. His research focuses on constitutional law, property law, and the study of popular political participation and its implications for constitutional democracy.] I don’t have a lot to say about Obama’s nomination of Elena Kagan that can’t be said better by others. Unlike now-Justice Sotomayor, she does not have an extensive record on issues that are within my core areas of expertise. I do, however, want to

John Nichols: Will Kagan Take Up Stevens's Fight for Checks on Executive Power?

[John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.] When President Obama taps Solicitor General Elena Kagan as his nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens this morning, he will be will making a cautious choice that runs the risk, in the words for former National Lawyers Guild president Marjorie Cohn "

Tom Goldstein: The Ten Biggest Issues Elena Kagan Will Face

[Tom Goldstein is a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, and lecturer at Stanford and Harvard Law Schools. He is the founder of SCOTUSblog, where this piece was originally posted.] Here is how I think the nomination process is likely to play out. I divide it into process and substance. First, the process: Note the relationship between Monday’s announcement and the Senate calendar. There are seven weeks between Monday and June 28. Six to seven weeks is traditio

Jeffrey Rosen: The Next Justice

[Jeffrey Rosen is the legal affairs editor of The New Republic and author of The Most Democratic Branch: How the Courts Serve America.] In a 1998 profile of Elena Kagan in the New Republic, Dana Milbank described Bill Clinton’s deputy chief of domestic policy as “wonderwonk,” an “all purpose brain” in the White House and a “nerd who could talk tough.” In addition to acting as a walking encyclopedia for Bill Clinton on constitutional and legal issues, Kagan convinced John McCain and

Michael D. Shear: What Obama Sees in Kagan

[Michael D. Shear is a staff writer for the Washington Post.] It's Kagan! Why is President Obama choosing his solicitor general, Elena Kagan, as his second nominee to the U.S Supreme Court? By all accounts, Obama wants someone who can serve as a counterweight to the intellectual heft of Chief Justice John Roberts. Regardless of how strong a liberal Kagan would prove to be, as a former dean of Harvard Law School, Kagan practically defines legal gravitas. She

James Doty: The Liberal Case Against Kagan is Overstated

[James Doty is a writer and lawyer living in New York.] Over the past several weeks, a chorus of progressive voices has portrayed Elena Kagan -- whom President Obama is expected to nominate for the Supreme Court on Monday -- as an intellectual cipher. She may be smart, they argue, but she has provided few clues about her thoughts on any major legal issues and even fewer about her judicial philosophy. Even worse, her critics claim, what we do know about Kagan’s beliefs suggests that

Lisa L. Kirchner: Feminism's Mommy Issues

[Lisa L. Kirchner is a freelance writer.] Mother's Day is a time of year when many of us reflect on our first and most complex bond in life and ask the big questions. Author Susan Faludi has taken it one step further. She wants to know, "does feminism have a mother-daughter problem?" During a speech earlier this year at the New School, Faludi unveiled some theories she's been developing about these mommy issues, and she later spoke with me to expand on these thoughts for S

Ben Eidelson: Liberals are Making the Wrong Case Against Racial Profiling

[Ben Eidelson is a graduate student in philosophy at Oxford University, where his research focuses on the ethics of discrimination.] Watch one of the many cable news debates about racial profiling, and it will probably go something like this: First a pundit will ask why, if there are patterns in who attempts terrorist attacks, we shouldn't scrutinize some people more than others. Shouldn't we be looking for the next Faisal Shahzad or Mohamed Atta? Then the designated opponent of pro

Robert Fisk: The Arabs have their gulags too

[Robert Fisk is The Independent's Middle East correspondent.] We know all about Guantanamo. We know about "black" prisons. You only have to read the evidence from the latest drum-head "trial" at Guantanamo – a man called Khadr, arrested by the Americans for killing a US soldier at the age of 15, found chained in a tiny cell at Bagram by an American medic, hooded and crying – to know what Western "justice" still means. But let's flip the cu

Alistair Osborne: UK General Election ... 1974 doesn't look any better second time around

[Alistair Osborne is Business Editor at the Telegraph.] Last time there was a hung Parliament, Britain was drowning in debt, the global economy was rocky and, across UK industry, the workers were revolting. Sound familiar? Harold Wilson's Lab-Lib coalition struggled along to the soundtrack of Carl Douglas's Kung Fu Fighting. Appropriate that. The pact started on March 4 and fell apart in time for a second election on October 10, when Wilson got in with a majority of th

Mark Blyth and Jonathan Hopkin: Labour Pains ... Why the British General Election Is a Referendum on Its Past

[Mark Blyth is Professor of International Political Economy at Brown University. Jonathan Hopkin is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics.] British Prime Minister Gordon Brown could delay the inevitable for only so long. Convention requires the government to hold general elections every five years, and with the last election held in 2005, that deadline was drawing inexorably closer. Although Brown and his Labour Party were slipping in popularity,

Matthew Spalding: The New Despotism of Bureaucracy

[Matthew Spalding is director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation, and author of We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future.] The objective of the American Founding was to break free of the old despotism, characterized by the arbitrary will of the stronger, based on force and fraud, masked by the false claims of long inheritance or divine right. Virtually every government at the time was based on a claim

Guy-Uriel Charles , Anupam Chander, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig: The White House's Kagan Talking Points are Wrong

[The writers are all professors of law: Guy-Uriel Charles is at Duke Law School; Anupam Chander is at the University of California-Davis Davis School of Law; Luis Fuentes-Rohwer is at Indiana University's School of Law; and Angela Onwuachi-Willig is at the University of Iowa College of Law.] Like everyone in the legal academy over the last decade, we have watched with admiration the amazing changes that Elena Kagan brought to Harvard Law School. A fractured faculty, divided among id

Cholene Espinoza: An Elegy for the Dragon Lady

[Cholene Espinoza is a former U-2 pilot.] FIFTY years ago today, the Soviet Union announced that it had shot down an American U-2 spy plane and that its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was alive. It seems like a long-ago event from the cold war. That may be why, in this era of satellites and drones, most people are surprised to learn that the U-2 is not only still in use, but that it is as much a part of our national security structure as it was a half-century ago.

Peggy Noonan: Lessons from Britain's Long War with the IRA

[Peggy Noonan writes a column for the Wall Street Journal.] Britain faced a quarter-century of terror bombings from the Irish Republican Army, which literally calling its campaign "the long war." But the IRA found itself up against a particular spirit, a national attitude that isn't remembered enough or lauded enough. We see some of it in these words: "There is no excuse for the IRA's reign of terror. If there violence were, as the misleading phrase often has it, 'min