Kagan Will Be Confirmed by Tim Siggia

Kagan Will Be Confirmed

By Tim Siggia

July 31, 2010

"There are no morals in politics, there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel." -- Vladimir Lenin

To put a negative spin on the old Gabriel Heatter introduction, there's no good news tonight. Elena Kagan will be confirmed as the new Supreme Court justice to replace retiring justice John Paul Stevens. The vote of the Senate Judiciary Committee will take place on July 13, after which the Kagan nomination will go to the full Senate for confirmation. Rest assured, it's all window dressing, for the decision has been made already. It's already a done deal. In the end, it all comes down to pure mathematics: Democrats outnumber Republicans in the Senate, and the Democrats already have made up their minds to confirm Kagan. The best Republicans can do is to filibuster, and we already have a strong signal from Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) that this will not happen. So like it or not, Elena Kagan is the new justice. The confirmation will merely make it all official.

Objections to this nomination are both legitimate and plentiful. By any objective standard, Kagan, whose only credentials are having served as dean of the Harvard School of Law and as a legal adviser to President Bill Clinton, is not qualified to serve on the Supreme Court. She is not, and never has been, a judge. She has never heard a case. Her attempts to bar military recruiters from the Harvard campus were clearly unconstitutional, and were ruled so in federal court. But, as is the case with so much else in the Obama administration, this is clearly an instance in which objective standards do not apply and do not count. Kagan is Obama's choice, and right now he has the luxury of a rubber-stamp Congress that will give him anything he wants.

The good news here for conservatives, little though it is, is that this will not change the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court, it will merely preserve the status quo. One liberal justice will be replaced by another, resulting in what we already currently have: a Supreme Court made up of four conservative justices (Roberts, Scalia, Alito, and Thomas), four liberal justices (Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan), and one "swing" justice (Kennedy). The High Court will continue to be presided over by a conservative, John Roberts. Objectively speaking, it's about as ideologically balanced as you can get. Even in the event of a third vacancy occurring during the Obama presidency, the eyes are on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the most likely possibility to open that vacancy -- which again would leave Obama with little choice but to preserve the status quo.

The confirmation hearings on Elena Kagan are purely for public consumption, the package deal having been pretty much already arranged. During questioning, Kagan has done her best to portray herself as thoughtful, objective, and one whose first considerations in any case would be the Constitution and the rule law; that she would be one who would put her ideological beliefs aside to fairly hear all cases brought before her. Astute observers will not be fooled by this charade. Bottom line is, were Elena Kagan anything but a far-left radical, Barack Obama never would have nominated her. The last thing he wants on the High Court is another Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas. What he wants is an activist liberal jurist who will legislate from the bench, and Kagan, for all the "correct" answers she has given during the hearings, shows every promise of being just that kind of justice.

This, along with everything else that has taken place during the Obama presidency, is all part of Obama's master plan to remake America: that is, to deliberately dismantle the country militarily, financially, and constitutionally, in order to make it ripe for communism. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the recent British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico offshore of Louisiana. As Nero fiddled while Rome burned, so Obama played golf and schmoozed with celebrities while the oil poured unchecked into the gulf in waters under federal jurisdiction. Offers of help from other countries were refused, ironically, on flimsy environmental grounds, and because of the Jones Act, which Obama could have suspended, but didn't. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal pleaded for permission to use booms to contain the spill. That permission was never granted, and only superficial help came from the federal government.

Some might point to this as evidence of Obama's incompetence and unfitness for his office, and had this happened under Jimmy Carter's presidency, the incompetence argument might hold water. But Obama is not stupid. He is deliberately allowing this to happen for the same reason he pushed for the so-called Affordable Health Care Act, and is now pushing for "immigration reform," a code-phrase for amnesty for illegal aliens. He wants America to fail! He wants America to fail because he wants capitalism to fail, and thus open the door to the communist America he has envisioned from the very beginning.

As we all know, November is coming, and here again, Obama is not stupid. He has to know that Americans are angry and that the days of the rubber-stamp Congress are now numbered. It is for this reason that he doubles down on the push to ramrod as much of his communist agenda as he can while he still has that luxury. He knows the coming elections will be a referendum on his presidency, but, like Bill Clinton before him, he is protected by the fact that he himself will not be up for reelection for another two years. So it is that when Congress changes hands -- and, by all accounts, it will -- we will have the same kind of gridlock we had during Clinton's second term. Obama will be stymied by a Congress in opposition, but he will still have the power of the veto and the sycophant news media at his beck-and-call. But gridlock is not acceptable to the far-left Obama, which is why he continues to push for the passage of as much of his communist agenda as he can while he still has a rubber-stamp Congress.

It is no accident that everything -- everything -- Barack Obama has done so far has followed the Saul Alinsky playbook to the letter. (And let us not forget here that as a professor at the University of Chicago School of Law, Obama once taught a course on application of the principles of Alinsky's Rules For Radicals.) He fully intends to make the United States of America into a Marxist socialist republic under his totalitarian rule, but with one departure from communist orthodoxy: Where Lenin preached violent revolution, Obama prefers the Alinsky method of using the system to make it self-destruct. The Kagan Supreme Court nomination, like that of Sonia Sotomayor before it, is in total keeping with that end.

It is for this reason that the upcoming November elections are so important. Not only the fate, but the very identity of our country, is at stake here. We cannot get rid of Obama right away. Until he commits an identifiable crime in office, impeachment is out of the question, even with a turnover of Congress. But we can frustrate his efforts.

And we should.