In my previous article, Top 10 Questions Kagan Should Be Asked at the Hearings, I proposed that, given Kagan’s past hostility toward religious groups, she should be asked about her views on the First Amendment, including the question, “From where — or from Whom — do our ‘inalienable’ rights come?”
But as it turns out, I was giving Miss Kagan too much credit. She can’t even tell us we have inalienable rights!
Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) questioned Kagan about this very topic in her hearings last week, and she clearly stated that she does not “have a view of what our natural rights [are] independent of the Constitution.” Sen. Coburn pressed on:
COBURN: Are there inalienable rights for us? Do you believe that?
KAGAN: Senator Coburn, I think that the question of what I believe as to what people’s rights are outside of the Constitution and the laws, that you should not want me to act in any way on the basis of such a belief.
How can we ever confirm a Supreme Court Justice that has a hard time understanding our most cherished foundational principles? Her perplexing and eye-opening stumble through Sen. Coburn’s questioning reminded me of the warning of Thomas Jefferson, forever engraved in his memorial monument in Washington, D.C.:
God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.
Kagan has no understanding of this. It is crystal clear our liberties will never be secure with her at the Supreme Court.
Isn’t it astounding how little understanding of this basic principle of freedom the left has? They love to talk about Brown v. Board of Education and Plessy v. Ferguson without ever understanding that there are things that go beyond the courts and even legislatures. Racism and slavery have always been wrong, no matter what Plessy said and what the Founders did.
In fact, today we are seeing a similar tragedy with the unborn. Even though we have Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the killing of innocent human life will never be right or truly legal, no matter how many Supreme Court decisions we get to the contrary. That is how we know the injustice of abortion will end one day, just as our Founding Fathers knew then that the tragedy of slavery could not perpetually continue.
But to Kagan, this is foolishness. In Kagan’s world the government gives us our rights and, therefore, they can also take them away. That is why President Obama is confident she will uphold his unconstitutional health care power grab and the rest of his big government agenda.
So I guess there was no real Fourth of July celebration for Miss Kagan. That silly Declaration of Independence cannot be taken seriously, right? You would think she would understand that without the Declaration of Independence there could be no Constitution, that the Constitution can only be viewed properly in light of the Declaration of Independence, and that if there are no inalienable rights, then we had no right to separate and become an independent nation in the first place.
But there I go again, jumping to conclusions. Maybe Elena Kagan thinks we are not an independent country after all. Maybe she believes that, legally, we still belong to Great Britain. Maybe it was really tea time at the Kagan household this Fourth of July.
That would at least explain why she made “International Law” a required course at Harvard Law School and left Constitutional Law as an elective.
Kagan’s record is full of reasons to doubt her judgment. Pages could be written on her twisted view of the First Amendment, her unlawful treatment of the military at Harvard, her obvious bias in favor of homosexual “rights,” her extremely radical views on abortion “rights,” her disdain for the Second Amendment, etc.
But no view is more egregious than her lack of understanding of who we are as a nation and where our liberties come from. Indeed I tremble for my country when I contemplate Kagan and her views at the Supreme Court.