Civil rights organizations question nominee Elena Kagan's record on race

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Source: The Washington Post

On the eve of Elena Kagan's Senate confirmation hearings, her record on race in the Clinton White House and at Harvard Law School is producing discomfort among some leading civil rights organizations, leaving them struggling to decide whether they want her to join the Supreme Court.

Their reservations have introduced the first substantive division among liberals in what has otherwise been a low-key partisan debate over Kagan's merits to replace Justice John Paul Stevens. The uncertainty among some on the left is particularly striking, given that she was nominated by the nation's first black president.

Decades after the height of the civil rights movement, questions involving race and ethnicity persist as a recurrent theme before the Supreme Court, and attitudes on those issues remain a significant prism through which nominees are evaluated by those on the left and the right.

The National Bar Association, the main organization of black lawyers, has refrained from endorsing Kagan, giving her a lukewarm rating. The group's president, Mavis T. Thompson, said it "had some qualms" about Kagan's statements on crack-cocaine sentencing and what it regards as her inadequate emphasis while dean at Harvard Law School on diversifying the school along racial and ethnic lines. Others have expressed reservations about Kagan's views on affirmative action, racial profiling and immigration.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/26/AR2010062603649.html

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1. Would they rather have

• Former Police Officers like Bart Stupak or Jeff Sessions
  
• State Supreme Court Justices like John Cornyn or Richard Shelby
  

Obama is nose diving into a one term presidency. I am pessimistic as I watch where the country is going --- and how we Dems circle the wagons and fire on each other. Kagan may be the last Dem named to the Court for a generation.

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2. I have yet to hear of a SC nominee that didn't have some

group upset w/former rulings. Generally, it's a cherry picked issue, and one of relatively minor consequence, and one where the case was not looked at, but only a specific decision. Every case that comes before a court has certain differences that alter a decision. It would be one thing if a nominee were a Klan member, a nazi, a member of the Black Panthers, someone who was in favor of unlimited police power or a host of other noxious ideological stances and positions.

In contrast, virtually everyone who has been interviewed about Kagan has stated she is intelligent, diligent and knows the law as it pertains to the Constitution. Did anyone listen to the National Bar Association when Clarence Thomas was nominated? In a 1998 speech to the NBA, he spoke of several things, virtually all of them were against positions long held by the NBA. For reference:

"...presented during the 29 July 1998 meeting of the National Bar Association in Memphis, Tennessee. Thomas, long an enemy of numerous national civil rights advocacy groups for his determined (some, less patient, would add “hypocritical”) opposition to affirmative action—not to mention welfare and abortion rights—used the opportunity to attack his critics for what he perceived as their adherence to an “old order” that dictated how an African American ought to think, act, and vote.

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More than anything, however, Thomas’ speech bespeaks an outlook and attitude entirely frustrated with the idea that African Americans ought in any way to be beholden to political interests and social movements that have created actual reforms or cultural progress: “Today it seems quite acceptable to attack the court and other institutions when one disagrees with an opinion or policy.” As might be imagined, the reception to his address by an organization of African American lawyers and jurists was mute."

http://www.oxfordaasc.com/oa/article/primary/ps0263?p=oamonthA6oG7Ut2cQOW6&d=article/primary/ps0263




Considering the complete disaster that Clarence Thomas has proven to be, The National Bar Association might look at Kagan under a somewhat brighter light.