University of Colorado at Boulder law professors Scott Moss and Paul Campos can comment on President Obama's nomination of U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan as the nation's 112th U.S. Supreme Court justice.
According to Moss, Kagan will likely be confirmed for a number of reasons:
路 Obama has a larger Senate majority than any other president nominating a justice in recent history and all the contentious Senate confirmation battles have occurred when the president and the Senate were controlled by opposite parties.
路 The president met the opposition at least halfway by not nominating a member of the left's wish list, such as Diane Wood and Pamela Karlan, about whom the right had staked out especially strong opposition in advance.
路 The right will not successfully depict Kagan as a radical: the worst they have noted so far is the "underwhelming-because-it's-2010 fact that she opposed the military's sexual orientation discrimination."
Campos' opinion is that the president's nomination of Kagan is an abuse of the trust granted to him by the voters who put him in office 18 months ago because Kagan has no public record that would make an independent evaluation of her nomination possible.
"A central theme of Obama's campaign was that his administration would be committed to openness in government and to a fundamentally democratic public process for deciding major public policy questions," said Campos. "This nomination makes a mockery of that pledge."
Moss can be reached by calling 303-735-5374 or by e-mail at scott.moss@colorado.edu. Campos can be reached by calling 303-492-6053 or by e-mailing paul.campos@colorado.edu. Or contact Dirk Martin in the CU-Boulder Office of Media Relations and News Services at 303-492-6431 or dirk.martin@colorado.edu.
