Filibuster the Nomination of Elena Kagan! [UPDATED]

My friend Don McClarey has the story on the outrageous actions of Elena Kagan in working to overturn legislative bans on partial-birth abortion: "Kagan Engaged in Falsification of Evidence to Defeat Partial Birth Abortion Ban"

The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat Senator from New York, was a pro-abort, but he voted to ban partial birth abortion, which he correctly described as “barely disguised infanticide”. Many pro-aborts draw the line at this gruesome killing of an infant. Not so Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan apparently. Shannen W. Coffin has written a fascinating article at National Review Online. Coffin was the deputy attorney general in the Bush administration who defended the partial birth abortion ban law. In this article he details how Kagan falsified evidence in an attempt to defeat a partial birth abortion ban in Congress during the Clinton administration...

[...]

Go here to read the rest. Go here to read the Kagan memorandum of June 22, 1996, here to read her memorandum of December 14, 1996, and here to read Kagan’s note where she spoonfed the language to the [American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG)] which she wished to substitute for their prior accurate statement. Needless to say, I think Kagan’s support for partial birth abortion alone should be sufficient in any sane society to disqualify her from the Supreme Court. However, even supporters of the “barely disguised infanticide” known as partial birth abortion, should be repelled at the idea of an officer of the court altering evidence presented to Congress by the ACOG. Kagan lacks the ethics to be an attorney, let alone a justice of the Supreme Court.

My Comments:
I now wish to withdraw my initial assessment of President Obama's nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, in which I concluded that it could have been much worse. I no longer believe that to be the case. Even Diane Wood would be preferable to this nominee. Kagan's nomination should be opposed with every tool available to defeat the nomination, including the filibuster.

The Democrats believed the mild-mannered, highly qualified, and well-respected Samuel Alito to be so “extreme” that his nomination to the Supreme Court merited a filibuster.

I believe the filibuster to be borderline unconstitutional when exercised in the case of judicial appointments, and believe it should have been “nuked” when the Republicans had a chance. But thanks to the Senator who just received a rare GOP primary endorsement from National Review, the filibuster is still available to defeat nominations to the judiciary.

Therefore, working within the system we have [i.e. playing by the rules the Democrats have established for judicial nominations], I now support a filibuster of Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Her views on abortion are the very definition of extreme, but that’s hardly surprising coming from a Democrat-appointed nominee. But her falsifying a scientific report that was used as evidence before Congress and subsequently in court to defeat legislative bans on one of the more brutal abortion procedures ever dreamed up shows her to be not only extreme, but unethical and untrustworthy and makes unfit to be an officer of the court, much less a life-tenured member of the highest Court in the land deciding the very issues on which she has manipulated evidence to affect the outcome.


UPDATE (1 July)
Don has an excellent follow-up regarding Kagan's Clintonian parsing of what "is" is in response to questions about her involvement in drafting the memo manipulating and falsifying the ACOG findings.

The woman is unfit to sit on the Supreme Court. The filibuster is a tool that the Dems have given us to defeat judicial nominations, and you can be quite assured that they WILL use it again in the future to try to defeat Republican nominees who are far less "extreme" than the one currently sitting before the Judiciary Committee. We may not like it, but we are handcuffing ourselves and ensuring our own destruction if we don't play by the rules that have been set for us out of some misguided notion that we might look like "hypocrites" if we use a procedure of which we've been critical in the past. (And, before anyone goes there, please spare me the One Ring analogies).


Previous Pro Ecclesia posts on this subject:
Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court: Not As Bad as It Could Have Been ...