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Confirmation hearings
Why Did Virginia Thomas Call Anita Hill After All This Time?
By Matt Lewis - Politics DailyNearly two decades after their "she said, he said" public battle, Anita Hill and Justice Clarence Thomas are back in the news. The reason? Thomas' wife, Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, left a voice mail message seeking an apology from Hill, who accused her husband of sexual harassment during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991. The bizarre incident has sparked speculation as to why Ginni Thomas decided to contact Hill after all these years. Appearing on MSNBC's "Jansing & Company" Wednesday morning, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist Eugene Robinson said, "One gets the ...
Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill: The Bizarre and the Unsurprising
By Bonnie Erbé - Politics DailyVirginia Thomas' entreaty to Anita Hill seems strange. But it does not strike me as surprising. Wouldn't anyone find it strange that lo' these two decades after Justice Clarence Thomas' infamously embarrassing confirmation hearings, Justice Thomas' wife seems not to have moved on with her life? Anita Hill certainly has gotten beyond her 15 minutes of tormented fame. What in the world would give Ginni Thomas the idea that she might succeed at getting a woman who is not apologetic in the least, to apologize? This especially when Anita Hill has nothing for which to apologize. On the other ...
Elena Kagan Draws Opposition From Senators Who Backed Sotomayor
By Patricia Murphy - Politics DailyThere is no question that Elena Kagan will be easily confirmed by the Senate this week to join the U.S. Supreme Court. But in recent days, Kagan has lost a handful of key votes from both sides of the aisle that Sonia Sotomayor secured during her confirmation process a year ago. Several moderate senators say Kagan's limited courtroom experience makes her too much of an unknown to support. When the Senate voted 68 to 31 to confirm Sotomayor in 2009, every Democrat and nine Republicans backed her, while 31 GOP senators voted no. Among the nine Republicans who supported Sotomayor were Sens. ...
Opinion: Judicial Activism Has a New Face
By Ian Millhiser - AOL News(July 2) -- If you want to make a progressive tremble, yell "judicial activist" and laugh as they cower under their desk in fear. At least, that's been the pattern for the past two decades of judicial confirmation hearings. So when Elena Kagan took her seat at the beginning of her confirmation hearing, her opponents were pretty confident. Sure, the Senate's lopsided majority made defeating Kagan unlikely, but her opponents thought they would get the next-best thing: a weeklong infomercial on judicial conservatism. This time, however, the infomercial got canceled. While their more ...
Kagan Insists She Didn't Block Military at Harvard
By not in system - AOL NewsWASHINGTON (June 29) -- Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan maneuvered carefully through tough Republican questioning on military recruitment at Harvard Law School, gun owners' rights and free speech Tuesday, giving little ground to critics and drawing strong praise from Senate Democrats who command the votes to confirm her. In a long day of questioning at a hearing that stretched into the evening, Kagan came under fire from Sen. Jeff Sessions, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, for her decision as dean of Harvard Law to bar recruiters from the school's career services office ...
Kagan Pledges to Be Unbiased, Deferential to Congress
By not in system - AOL NewsWASHINGTON (June 28) -- Elena Kagan pledged to be a model of impartiality and restraint as a Supreme Court justice as the Senate opened confirmation hearings Monday, but she still braced for a grilling by Republicans who suggest she'd let liberal views color her rulings. Breaking weeks of public silence since President Barack Obama nominated her to be the fourth woman in the court's history, Kagan called the Supreme Court "a wondrous institution" but one with limited powers under the Constitution. She billed herself as a consensus-builder for the ideologically polarized court and said she'd ...
Opinion: Could Scalia Get Confirmed by Today's Conservatives?
By Ian Millhiser - AOL News(June 28) -- Justice Antonin Scalia is supposed to be a right-wing icon. He's an outspoken defender of torture and once wrote that mere innocence is not a good enough reason to let an innocent man go free. His dissent in a landmark gay rights decision boiled down to little more than a paranoid rant against the "homosexual agenda." Yet, if Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's opponents are to be believed, this same right-wing icon is far too liberal to sit on the Court. In the next week, for example, Senate conservatives will complain loudly about Kagan's stance on guns. While in the Clinton ...
Elena Kagan Confirmation: Tote Board Guide for Supreme Court Nominee Hearing
By Andrew Cohen - Politics DailyThe Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Solicitor General Elena Kagan, set to begin Monday, will be filled with tiny islands of insight and humor, amid an ocean of useless legal and political rhetoric. Now that the American Bar Association has taken some of the starch out of the "she's got no judicial experience" argument by giving the nominee its highest rating, there ought to be even less drama than last summer when Sonia Sotomayor went through the process before the same Senate Judiciary Committee. And there was very little drama back then. Still, there are certain expectations that ...
Kagan Sympathetic to Right of Religious Expression as Clinton White House Counsel
By Tom Diemer - Politics DailyAs a legal aide to President Clinton, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan appeared sympathetic to individuals' right of religious expression. In 1966, Kagan as a White House counsel, helped write an executive order spelling out the right of federal employees, within recognized "constraints," to express religious views in the workplace. In a memo, she also defended a California landlady who refused to rent to unmarried couples because of her religious belief opposing sex outside of marriage, according to files to be made public Friday by the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little ...
Sen. Tom Coburn Vows No Cream Puff Questions for Elena Kagan
By Andrew Cohen - Politics DailySen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), the histrionic legislator famously caught contemplating a crossword puzzle during the 2005 Supreme Court confirmation hearing for John Roberts, wants you to know that he's not going to go quite as easy on nominee Elena Kagan when she appears later this month before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Turns out the senator is fed up with Supreme Court nominees who fail or refuse to directly answer questions posed to them during the long public sessions that make up the bulk of judicial confirmation hearings. He believes that even the most noble court wannabes ought to be ...
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