Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network discuss Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court.

If you needed surgery, would you hire the successful hospital administrator or the experienced surgeon who spends all his days in the operating room? Easy answer: the surgeon. Unless you're President Barack Obama. He just announced his appointment of Elena Kagan as the next Supreme Court justice, replacing retiring justice John Paul Stevens. But she doesn't have experience as a judge. And she has spent a total of three years actually practicing before a court, two as a young associate and one as the U.S. solicitor general. The intervening eighteen years were spent on the faculties of the University of Chicago and Harvard law schools, with three years off to work in the Clinton White House. By all accounts, she was a successful dean at Harvard Law School. But that doesn't say much about her qualifications as a judge.

President Obama is planning to nominate Elena Kagan to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court later this morning.  Here are some statements from prominent conservative legal experts, professors, and former Supreme Court clerks reacting to the nomination.

Check back here at JCN and a SCOTUSReport for continuing news on the nomination.

Carrie Severino, Chief Counsel, Judicial Crisis Network, former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas:

“President Obama has nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan to replace Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court.  Obama wants to pack the court with reliable liberal votes to rubber-stamp an agenda that he knows the American people would not accept.  What better way than to appoint a loyalist from his own Department of Justice with a thin public record to advance his leftist legacy through the Court.

President Obama is about to nominate someone for the Supreme Court. On the day he or she is unveiled, conservatives will announce that they are approaching the selection with an open mind. Ten minutes later they will declare, more in sadness than anger, that the nominee has the judicial philosophy of Chairman Mao and the temperament of Dennis Rodman. Ten minutes after that, liberals will rise en masse to defend the nominee as wise, brilliant and humane, a person who restores our faith in humankind. And the kabuki theater will continue like that all summer long.

I can’t blame my fellow liberals for playing along; if the other side fires, we have to fire back. But there’s one exception. If Solicitor General Elana Kagan gets the nod, conservatives will beat the hell out of her for opposing military recruitment on campus when she was dean of Harvard Law School. And liberals should concede the point; the conservatives will be right.

Obama's backpedaling is not surprising. Almost 65 percent of respondents, according to a recent Judicial Crisis Network nationwide poll, worry that Obama will nominate a justice who would rubber-stamp his liberal policies.

Dear Friend of the Constitution: Where will our liberties be thirty years from now? President Obama is on the verge of nominating a new Supreme Court justice who will have a lot to say about that. From racial preferences and abortion to property rights and terrorism, retiring Justice Stevens and his three decades of liberal activism did tremendous damage to the Constitution. His replacement has the potential to either build upon or roll back Stevens' "legacy."

President Obama and his nominees have something in common: they are afraid to say what they actually mean.  Radical Ninth-Circuit nominee Goodwin Liu spent his whole confirmation hearing running from his academic record, going so far as to declare that “whatever I may have written in the books and in the articles would have no bearing on my role as a judge.”  But he closed with an appeal to his record: “As you look across my entire record, there are many things I think relevant to the kind of judge I would be.”  Which will it be, Mr. Liu?
 

In an earlier post I pointed out the errors in Senator Leahy’s criticism of some recent Supreme Court decisions: They boil down to frustration that the Court was actually applying the law rather than amending it as Leahy would have done. Here’s a look at the other two cases in which Leahy claims the Court “rewrote the law.”

President Obama has done what we thought impossible: he has nominated someone to the Ninth Circuit that actually could move that ultra-liberal court to the Left. Goodwin Liu is a Berkely professor with less than two years’ legal practice whose own published work illustrates why there truly is a crisis in the judiciary today, and his hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled for this Friday, April 16. Please call the Senators on that committee by Friday asking them to vote no on Goodwin Liu.