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Some Hard Questions for Elena Kagan

Her poor record of diversity hiring while the dean at Harvard Law School could cause some embarrassment for the Supreme Court nominee--and President Obama.

Source: The Root

President Barack Obama's pick of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to fill the seat vacated by Justice John Paul Stevens is widely regarded as the safest choice the president could make. She was just confirmed to her seat as the government's counsel to the Supreme Court by a 61-31 vote last year. Seven Republicans voted in support of Kagan for solicitor general. She has an impressive résumé that gives an air of historic importance to her nomination as well. She is the former dean of Harvard Law School and will be the fourth woman on the Supreme Court. After graduating from law school, she served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall. She even constitutes somewhat of an answer to those who argued that the track to the Supreme Court had been narrowed to those sitting on the federal appellate courts. She has no judicial experience and thus falls outside the ''judicial monastery'' that has been the source of all recent nominees. The fact that Kagan doesn't have much of a paper trail--not only has she not served as a judge, but she's written only a very few non-controversial law review articles--means that Republicans will not have a huge source of material from which to try and caricature Kagan ideologically. And Kagan is, by all accounts, a moderate, who probably falls slightly to the right of retiring Justice John Paul Stevens on a variety of issues.

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