Kagan Double Talk Regarding Obama Management of the Personal Lives of Americans

I go to the British publication, the Guardian and its website, guardian,co,uk fairly often to review a more civilized lefty publication regarding American affairs usually, that either the Washington Post or the New York Times.   It does not mask the deviousness of the countless chapters of  ”let’s pretend” politics of the American Left’s books in Congress and the Supreme Court.

The following article was found at Michael Tomasky’s Blog at the Guardian site:

“Republicans are pouncing on the less-than-crystal-clear answer Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan gave late in Tuesday’s confirmation hearing to a question from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) about whether the government has the right to micromanage Americans’ diets.

“If I wanted to sponsor a bill and it said Americans, you have to eat three vegetables and three fruits every day and I got it through Congress and that’s now the law of the land, got to do it, does that violate the Commerce Clause?” Coburn asked.

“Sounds like a dumb law,” Kagan replied. “But I think that the question of whether it’s a dumb law is different from whether the question of whether it’s constitutional and I think that courts would be wrong to strike down laws that they think are senseless just because they’re senseless.”

That portion of Kagan’s noncommittal answer seemed to suggest that Congress had carte blanche to create a nanny state that would regulate Americans’ day-to-day lives. “Kagan declines to say gov’t has no power to tell Americans what to eat,” reads a headline on the video posted by Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans and currently prominently linked on the Drudge Report.

I guess I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the government should in fact be able to pass a law ordering that Americans eat three vegetables a day. On the other hand this is pretty much a classic argument about individual liberty vs. the common good that liberalism always loses in American culture but not necessarily in others.

If everyone ate three servings of vegetables a day, we’d be living in an improved society. Heart attacks and obesity would reduce, health-care costs would go down by the order of billions of dollars, American farmers would be making more money and on and on and on and on. The benefits would be vast.

But of course, to American conservatives, this would be fascism. Even something well short of this would be accused of being fascist, since after all Hitler liked vegetables, too.

To me it’s like this. Any society is full of competing values and interests. Here, we have the value of individual liberty competing with the value of overall social health. I have big trouble taking seriously the idea that making fast-food joints post their nutritional information is fascism. However, I have a hard time seeing how any sane person could deny that a largely fast-food diet will kill a person.

It’d be nice if conservatives showed an ounce of interest in this problem, instead of acting as if a person’s right to live on triple bacon-cheeseburgers is as inalienable as free speech. And it’s interesting once again that McDonald’s and Wendy’s and the rest are not just junk-food purveyors but also major international corporations and the GOP just happens to be on their side.

Anyway, Kagan didn’t answer, as any liberal would not, because she knew Coburn was really talking about healthcare reform. But if this is the best they got, she has no worries.

Comment:  Republicans should be pouncing.    They have been sitting on their soft pudge for about  32 of the past 40 years…..

Sonia Sotomayor Should Have Been Required to Testify Under Oath When She Was Put Up For Supreme Court Polical Office

…….And she should be under indictment for perjury today.

Marxist and other Leftwingers loathe to tell the truth, knowing full well that people believing in personal freedom, general liberty and E Pluribus Unum  would always reject their poisonous view denigrating the human to drone life to service the Government queen bee.

Expect  Marxist Ellen Kagan to load her answers with lies and distortions  as well.  Why aren’t these candidates for Supreme Court seats require to speak under oath during their hearings???

Jonah Gold berg wrote an article in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, Why the Kagan Hearings Will Be A Charade.  ………. ……….”Many liberals, including Kagan, think that the “Borking” of Robert Bork during his 1987 confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court would deserve a commemorative plate if the Franklin Mint launched a “great moments in legal history” line of dishware.

I don’t share that view. And although I have no desire to rehearse all the ways in which Bork was mistreated by Ted Kennedy and the usual liberal interest groups, I do think an often underemphasized outcome of the Bork hearings is worth dwelling on. Bork was the last Supreme Court nominee to give serious answers to serious questions. But because he was successfully anathematized by the left, no nominee since has dared show Borkian forthrightness.

Consider Monday’s thunderclap from the judicial Mt. Olympus: The 2nd Amendment right to own a gun extends to state and local government. Personally, I think Justice Clarence Thomas’ separate opinion in favor of the 14th Amendment’s “privileges and immunities” clause over the due process clause was the better argument. But that’s a debate for another day.

The more newsworthy opinion came from rookie Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She concurred with Justice Stephen G. Breyer’s dissent, which held that there is no fundamental right to bear arms in the U.S. Constitution. “I can find nothing in the 2nd Amendment’s text, history or underlying rationale that could warrant characterizing it as ‘fundamental’ insofar as it seeks to protect the keeping and bearing of arms for private self-defense purposes,” Breyer wrote for the minority.

But when Sotomayor was before the Senate Judiciary Committee one year ago for her own confirmation hearings, she gave a very different impression of how she saw the issue. Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy asked her, “Is it safe to say that you accept the Supreme Court’s decision as establishing that the 2nd Amendment right is an individual right? Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir,” she replied.”

(Maybe Judge Sonia Sotomayor, like President Bill Clinton who queried about the meaning of the verb, “is”, during his sex scandal days, Ms. Sotomayor is English language impaired.)….my insertion here..ghr

Goldberg continues.  “Now, both Sotomayor and Leahy festooned their colloquies with plenty of lawyerly escape hatches. That’s why Leahy asked the questions the way he did and that’s why she answered them the way that she did. It’s also why he spun her answers into more than they were: “I do not see how any fair observer could regard [Sotomayor's] testimony as hostile to the 2nd Amendment personal right to bear arms, a right she has embraced and recognizes.” He deliberately made it sound as though she was open to an expansive reading of the 2nd Amendment when everyone knew she wasn’t (as a judge, she was hardly a hero of the NRA).

Now, let me be clear. Sotomayor was nothing like an exception to the rule; she was following it.

Although the Bork inquisition was a largely partisan affair, the consequences have yielded a bipartisan sham. Republican and Democratic nominees alike are trained to say as little as possible and to stay a razor’s width on the side of truthfulness. The point is not to give the best, most thoughtful or most honest answer, but the answer that makes it the most difficult for senators to vote against you. It’s as if we expect nominees to demonstrate, one last time, everything we hate and distrust about lawyers before they don their priestly robes.

In fairness to everyone concerned, nobody is shocked to discover that Sotomayor is in fact precisely the dyed-in-the-wool liberal justice everyone expected her to be. But the fact that everyone is in on the lie is just further evidence of the sham Supreme Court hearings have become. They are a nonviolent and fairly bloodless cousin to totalitarian show trials, where everyone follows a script and politicians pretend to be “gravely concerned” and “shocked” upon “discovering” things they already knew.

And that’s why Kagan could be the hero of this tale. She has vociferously argued that the “Bork hearings were great … the best thing that ever happened to constitutional democracy.” She has lamented how, ever since, hearings have become nothing more that “a repetition of platitudes.” Kagan implored senators to dig deep into the nominee’s “constitutional views and commitments.”

If I had to bet, Kagan will reject the “Kagan standard” and play the game. And if she does play the game she has long deplored, why should anyone take any of her platitudes seriously?”

Comment:  Consolation fellow Americans.  No one has yet compared America to Imperial Rome regarding its quick fall to moral decay.  These Liberal Judges are only liars.