Will Kagan Pursue a “Liberal” Agenda?

The attempts to frame Elena Kagan pre-emptively as a wild-eyed, party-line liberal, socialist even, and quite possibly a lesbian who “looks like she belongs in a Kosher deli” (wink, wink, you vestigial anti-Semites), started long before President Obama uttered her name as his second pick for the Supreme Court.

On day three of the confirmation hearings, in which Judiciary committee Chair Patrick Leahy (D-VT) plans to conclude the ritual grilling of the fourth woman ever nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, no one on either side of the aisle seems to imagine a scenario in which she won’t be confirmed.

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Sotomayor! Sotomayor? Sotomayor.

Yesterday, Alan Colmes’ new show, strategyroom.com, caught up with me as I was running from meeting to meeting in the rain, and asked me to talk with them about Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination especially related to her reproductive rights decisions. Here’s the video segment, where you’ll see the right-wing guest Wendy Long, acknowledging that the Republicans probably wouldn’t support any Obama nominee. Alan had some great examples of how the issues of empathy and personal life experiences have been used in the past to argue for SCOTUS nominees that might surprise you. Take a look:

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Partial Truth Decision

“[The] partial birth abortion ban is a political scam but a public relations goldmine…The major benefit is the debate that surrounds it.”

So said Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, a militant anti-choice group that blockaded abortion providers, in 2003.

Today’s U.S. Supreme Court’s Gonzales v Carhart decision upholding the federal abortion ban is based that pubic relations goldmine. It is a travesty of language bought and repeated endlessly by journalists who were sometimes uninformed and sometimes just too lazy to get it right.

Indeed, the travesty of language around abortion is so pervasive that even Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the decision for the Court’s majority, in addition to using the term “partial birth abortion”, also used the term “abortion doctor” repeatedly in the ruling. Why did he not simply refer to doctors as “doctors”, or if ob/gyns call them “ob/gyns”? If another surgical procedure were under scrutiny, would he have he referred to “tonsillectomy doctor” or “hysterectomy doctor”? Of course not. But those who want to take away a woman’s human right to make her own childbearing decisions entirely have for so long used the term “abortion doctor” as an epithet that they have succeeded in getting even the highest court in the land to use their language.

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