Elena Kagan Not Supreme Court Material

That Barack Obama is the most anti-gun president we've ever had in the White House is an obvious worry.  His previous selection of controversial "wise Latina" Sonia Sotomayor for the court raised eyebrows because her views on guns are relatively unknown.  Nevertheless, we'll know shortly when the McDonald v. Chicago decision comes out in the next month or so.

Not so with Elena Kagan.  Her thinking is apparently in line with the anti-rights crowd, as evidenced by her history. 

In 1987, she was a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall.  At that time, she said she had no sympathy for the claim of a man that his 2nd Amendment rights were violated.  The case involved a man convicted for carrying an unlicensed pistol in Washington D.C. 

She was in the Justice Department during the Clinton administration and according to records at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark., she also drafted an executive order restricting the importation of certain semiautomatic assault rifles.

There’s more evidence of hostility to gun rights on her part. The Times also reports that “gun-control efforts were a hallmark of the Clinton Administration. Kagan had already been involved in an executive order that required all federal law-enforcement officers to install locks on their weapons.”

There is a high probability that Kagan also worked on legislation to effectively close gun shows.

Today, Kagan serves as Solicitor General, whose job it is to argue the government point of view in important legal cases before the Supreme Court. 

When the Supreme Court considered its last Second Amendment case, the landmark 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller, then-U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement filed a brief in the case, then requested and received time to argue the federal government’s position in that case as to the meaning of the Second Amendment.

When the McDonald case was argued before the Court on March 2 of this year, current Solicitor General Kagan argued… Nothing. Not only did she not ask for time during oral argument, she didn’t even file a brief (which the solicitor general routinely does in important constitutional cases—and the McDonald case is monumentally important).

Normally, we'd expect the Solicitor General to argue the government's view of the case.  However, today that would require acknowledgment of the Heller decision that individual Americans have a right to keep and bear arms.  The Solicitor General could argue to narrowly define the right or to support the case against Chicago. 

However, it appears that Kagan has little desire to be forced into the position of acknowledging the Heller decision in the first place. 

In the spring of 1995, Kagan wrote a book review of Stephen Carter’s The Confirmation Mess. “When the Senate ceases to engage nominees in a meaningful discussion of legal issues, the confirmation process takes on an air of vacuity and farce, and the Senate becomes incapable of either properly evaluating nominees or appropriately educating the public,” Kagan wrote.

So we, as gun owners, must write our representatives in Congress and demand they hold Kagan up to her own standards.  She should not be allowed to weasel her way around direct questions about Second Amendment issues.  Support of "most of" the Constitution is not acceptable.