Various comments on Elena Kagan

Common Dreams opines that a Kagan appointment would push the Court to the right:

But she has been a loyal foot soldier in Obama's fight against terrorism and there is little reason to believe that she will not continue to do so. During her confirmation hearing for solicitor general, Kagan agreed with Senator Lindsey Graham that the president can hold suspected terrorists indefinitely during wartime, and the entire world is a battlefield.

The WSJ notes some prior ties to Goldman Sachs, which reportedly are insignificant:

From 2005 to 2008, Ms. Kagan was a paid member of the Research Advisory Council of Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute, according to financial-disclosure reports she filed after being appointed to her current job. The form shows she was paid $10,000 in 2008, when she was dean of Harvard Law School.

Glenn Greenwald offers some trenchant observations in his Salon column:

The White House Monday said that the Supreme Court nominee won't follow her own advice from 1995 in answering questions on specific legal cases or issues, supporting Kagan’s flip flop on the issue that she first made a year ago.

Kagan wrote in 1995 that the confirmation process had become a "charade" because nominees were not answering direct questions, and said they should have to do so.

But during a briefing with reporters in the White House, Ron Klain, a top legal adviser to Vice President Joe Biden who played a key role in helping President Obama choose Kagan, said that she no longer holds this opinion. . . .

It would be one thing if Kagan had been formulated this view when she were a college sophomore and then re-considered it as her career progressed. But that's not the case. In 1995, Kagan was a tenured faculty member of the University of Chicago Law School... Does anyone, anywhere, believe that her "reversal" is motivated by anything other than a desire to avoid adhering to the standards she tried to impose on others?

...In one interesting exchange, Kagan not only states that she believes we are "at war" but agrees that we should have considered ourselves at war since the 1990s . . . . Kagan’s writings (as little as there is) is highly problematic for liberals. . . . For liberals, the problem is her "pragmatic" approach to civil liberties and support for Bush policies. Stevens was the fifth vote in opposing such policies and Kagan could well flip that result. Few could have imagined that voting for Obama would have resulted in moving the Court to the right, but that appears to be case with the selection of Kagan.

And Matthew Yglesias raises the question about the necessity for lifetime appointments of Supreme Court justices:

Concerns you might have about justices being unduly influenced by political or financial considerations could be easily met by giving justices a single, non-renewable term of 9 or 10 or 12 years plus a decent pension.

I think this would have two advantages over the present system. One is that the current rule puts undue weight on throwing up young appointees...

What’s more, we might plausibly see in the near future the situation in which an elderly justice begins to suffer from very serious medical problems but refuses to step down because he or she finds the incumbent president ideologically uncongenial.